Michelle Monaghan on the Women and Scandals of ‘The White Lotus’ Season 3

Michelle Monaghan on the Women and Scandals of ‘The White Lotus’ Season 3

Spring is in the air—or at least hinting at it. But our cover model today is glad to be a little chilly after spending months in a Thai heat wave.

Michelle Monaghan, one of the stars of the new season of The White Lotus, joins me on Zoom looking like she walked straight out of the ’90s. Her structured leather jacket, complete with a neck flap, is a thing of grunge-inspired beauty. “It’s a bit of a Cinderella moment,” she says. If Cinderella was a biker. Or if Monaghan’s White Lotus co-star Parker Posey—a real-life ’90s indie queen—were Cinderella.

“She’s one of the most thoughtful, soulful women,” Monaghan raves about Posey. “She’s sage. She gives wise advice. She’s ethereal, but she’s grounded. I always call her a little bit of a witch, you know? I’d come over and knock on her door, and she’d have all of these lotions and potions. She’d say, ‘Come in here, try this, smell this.’ She was an incredible presence on set because she is so beloved by actors, and for the way she takes up her space. It’s like an acting class, you know, the way she improvises and interacts with props. She’s just an amazing actress.”

This celebration of Posey and other women in Monaghan’s life becomes a recurring theme in our conversation—a real sisterhood move, one that starkly contrasts with her toxic female trio in The White Lotus.

Monaghan is part of the stellar ensemble cast in the hit HBO show’s third season, whose fifth episode just aired. “I’m as much a fan as anyone else,” she says, adding that she’s long admired creator Mike White’s spiritual insights.

“He’s a great observer of human behavior,” she reflects. “He sees everything and everyone. You know, everything he writes really comes from a place of authenticity.”

For devoted viewers, Monaghan teases a major reveal coming soon. “I think as we progress through the season, people are going to be shocked at how he wrote this a few years ago. Talk about being a seer! People are going to be like, ‘How did he know that?’”

She’s joining me from London, where she’s filming the action-comedy The Family Plan 2 with Mark Wahlberg, before heading home to LA to reunite with her family—her husband, Australian graphic artist Peter White, and their teenage daughter and tween son. But today, we’re here to talk about Thailand—specifically, the months she spent filming this season of White’s famously vicious whodunit anthology, set mainly on the northeastern coast of the stunning island of Koh Samui.

Following The White Lotus formula, multiple storylines revolve around various guests. Monaghan’s character, Jaclyn, is an actress who’s been famous for decades. “I thought, ‘Oh gosh, that hits a little close to home,’” she says with a laugh. “And then I got access to all eight episodes, binge-read them, and thought, ‘Holy s—, he’s done it again!’”

Monaghan, 48, hails from Iowa. She worked as a model while in college before transitioning to film and TV in the early 2000s. One of her standout early roles was in the 2005 noir-comedy gem Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. She’s also played Tom Cruise’s love interest in three Mission: Impossible movies. Between her pairings with Wahlberg in The Family Plan sequel and 2016’s Patriots Day, and her powerhouse performance in 2007’s Ben Affleck-directed Gone Baby Gone, I tell her I’ve always thought of her as a Boston person.

“I get that a lot!” she says. “And I don’t even think I had an accent in Gone Baby Gone.” I bet she would have crushed it, though.

In The White Lotus, Monaghan’s character is on vacation with two childhood friends, played by Carrie Coon and Leslie Bibb. At first glance, they seem to adore one another—but that facade quickly crumbles.

“It’s so cringey, it’s so relatable!” Monaghan says. “Of course, this is heightened [in the show], but we can all recognize times in our lives when we’ve experienced this kind of toxic positivity. They present their best selves, and then, inevitably, we start to see the cracks in their ‘perfect’ lives.”

Monaghan’s storyline also touches on Hollywood’s ongoing conversation about aging, a theme explored in recent films like The Last Showgirl and The Substance. In The White Lotus, Jaclyn’s friends gossip about her behind her back, dissecting everything from her marriage to a younger man to speculation about whether—and how much—she’s had work done. But Jaclyn isn’t the only target; whenever one woman leaves the room, the other two go to town.

“There’s this constant comparison that women often have with each other—and with themselves,” Monaghan says. “This was something that Mike [White] has witnessed a lot in friendships—the way we endure those things and also perpetuate them.”

Monaghan, who has maintained a meditation practice for several years, was particularly drawn to the show’s spiritual themes and the stunning Thai locations they visited during filming. She points to a comment from her co-star Natasha Rothwell (who reprises her Season 1 role as Belinda) about how all the guests this season arrive with some sort of spiritual deficit.

“You can see they’re all struggling,” Monaghan says.

The struggle was also intensely physical. “I mean, it just kept getting hotter and hotter. I think it wound up being the hottest summer on record. Even Thai folks were like, ‘This is too hot.’”

Despite the intense heat, White made the steamy set—mainly shot at the Four Seasons Koh Samui and three Anantara luxury resorts—a playground for the actors. “He puts his magic wand on it. When you’ve got a bunch of people living together, interacting, and befriending one another—it’s a special experience, for sure.”

White even arranged for a monk to bless the hotel with a traditional Thai Spirit House ceremony. “The cast and crew were all there,” Monaghan recalls. “That was really important to Mike, for us to take part in that. It was actually quite emotional. There was a lot of chanting. I won’t forget that day. It was really beautiful.”

As with previous seasons, The White Lotus guests are impeccably dressed on screen. But when the cameras were off, Monaghan says, it was a different story.

“You see the show and everyone’s dressed to the nines. In real life, we’d be in T-shirts, greasy, hair tied back, sweating,” she laughs. “By the time we got home, I think everybody wanted to burn their clothes!”

Our spring shoot with Monaghan took place in LA’s Silver Lake neighborhood, though not without a hitch—our original location in Topanga Canyon was derailed by a fire, just months before January’s devastating countywide wildfires. Though Monaghan’s house was fortunately unaffected, she says, “everyone knows someone who lost their home. We have multiple friends who lost everything, and several more who have been displaced.”

When the shoot finally happened, Monaghan donned pieces from Gucci, Valentino, and Giambattista Valli. Her favorite? A dazzling beaded gown from Oscar de la Renta. “That dress was so amazing,” she says. “It was incredible—all these tiny little crystals. Just beautiful. What a fun day playing dress-up!”

On her rare days off, she enjoys baking. “I don’t even really have a sweet tooth—I just think there’s something meditative about the exactness of it. I’ll bake a bunch of banana or pumpkin bread and take it over to the neighbors.”

A true Midwesterner at heart, she and her family visit Iowa every summer. “Drinking beer outside, playing cornhole, lightning bugs, s’mores—that’s my jam, that’s my speed,” she says.

Last fall, she hit a meaningful milestone—teaching her daughter to drive in her tiny hometown. “It’s very chill, there’s not even a stoplight,” she says. “It was a real full-circle moment, realizing how far I’ve come and all the wonderful things I have in my life.”