‘T’m telling you it’s the universe looking out for me’

Michelle Monaghan talks to Adam White about her awkward and confronting’ role in The White Lotus’, acting as a way to pay off her college loans, and being on Tom Cruise’s cake list

- Adam White

"I can rattle off on one hand the movies I've worked on with women," Michelle Monaghan laughs. As if to prove her point, she begins to count the sausage fests she's been in and quickly runs out of fingers. Hollywood's most prolific wife, girlfriend and partner-in-peril, Monaghan has spent 25 years in film and television romantically involved with everyone from Tom Cruise and Adam Sandler to Woody Harrelson and Jake Gyllenhaal.

These were all different kinds of wife and girlfriend, I should add – tortured and restless while caught between Harrelson and Matthew McConaughy in True Detective; tough and resourceful when kidnapped by Philip Seymour Hoffman and averting deadly missiles in the Mission: Impossible movies. It’s not as if Monaghan has spent nearly three decades chopping vegetables in kitchen scenes and applying lotion to her hands before climbing into bed. But still. Even when you’re counting Gone Baby Gone – where she solved a missing persons case with Casey Affleck – or her star-making turn as a struggling actor in Shane Black’s frothy crime comedy Kiss Kiss Bang Bang… it’s been a hell of a lot of dudes.

“I don’t know if I even noticed it for a long time,” the 48-yearold says today, while dressed in a luxe power suit in a London hotel room, where she’s promoting the third season of The White Lotus, that sensational semi-annual parade of the rich, white and loathsome. “When I started acting, that was just what it was. If you were in a movie, you had a lot of male co-stars. If you were watching a movie, you were watching a lot of guys. It was the culture. It’s what was served on a plate for us and what we ate up.”