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Page 1 of 3 http://movies.ign.com/articles/446/446297p1.html IGN Interviews Dominic Monaghan An in-depth conversation with The Lord of the Rings' own Meriadoc Brandybuck. by
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December 16, 2003 - It's that time of year again.
You know the one I'm talking about.
Come on… You know.
Okay, fine, I'll tell you. This is the time of year when we cart out the big guns and deliver some of our massive in-depth interviews with castmembers from The Lord of the Rings trilogy. We've done Andy Serkis, Ian McKellen, and Billy Boyd.
This week it's Meriadoc himself, Dominic Monaghan. Next week is a surprise.
So until then, I hope you enjoy our interview with Dom. I'm sure Viggo Mortensen won't.
Dom's got a few projects to be on the lookout for (including that buddy flick with Billy Boyd), but the next one coming up is an independent film titled Shooting Livien.
IGN FILMFORCE: Am I correct in my understanding that you were actually born in Germany?
DOMINIC MONAGHAN: Yeah…
IGNFF: Were your parents stationed there, or…
MONAGHAN: My parents are kind of like hippies, you know? They enjoy traveling and being in new places and stuff, so they moved to Germany. My dad's a teacher and my mom's a nurse. It just worked, luckily enough, and they speak German, so we lived out there. It was good. We moved every three years.
IGNFF: And you spent a fair amount of time in Germany, right?
MONAGHAN: Yeah, 11 years.
IGNFF: Culturally, what was Germany like at that time for a kid your age?
MONAGHAN: I was only a little boy, and I was born there and then left when I was 11, so I really don't know an awful lot about it… But German food was kind of tasty, and it was a lot hotter than England in the summer and a lot colder than England in the winter, so we had a lot of snow and sledding and snowball fights, and stuff like that.
IGNFF: You also got a very clear sense of seasons…
MONAGHAN: Yeah, which you don't really get in England as much. I really liked German food. And it's very clean… It's a very clean country. They kind of get rid of the waste really well… the garbage. They recycle and are very environmentally aware, which is something I've held onto, and keeps me conscious of how much waste I cause in L.A., so I try to recycle and I try to get involved with environmental companies – which I'm sure came from the fact of living in Germany where they're so proficient at getting rid of their waste and so conscious of the fact that it's an important thing to do.
IGNFF: Growing up, would you visit England, or was it not until you moved back that you got your first sense of it?
MONAGHAN: No, we came back every year to see my grandparents and my cousins. When my brother and I were young – and we're still now – we were very close with our cousins on both sides of the family, so every year we would come over and get really excited that we were going to hang out with our cousins for Christmas and New Year, and see our grandparents. So once, maybe twice a year we'd come back to England.
IGNFF: How much of a difference was it going to school in Germany versus going to school in the UK?
MONAGHAN: Not a huge amount of difference. The good thing for me was that I knew when I moved back to England that if I made friends, I was going to be friends with them for a longer amount of time than just three years. I used to get quite upset that I'd make friends with a guy or a girl and then within the space of three years we'd move and go and live somewhere else, and you'd have to say goodbye to that person. So I was really excited about the fact that I could now form some really close friendships and that they'd be my friends for a longer amount of time. In terms of schooling, it's probably about the same, you know? They're both on a pretty high quality standard of education, I think.
IGNFF: If I remember correctly, you were a pretty good student, right?
MONAGHAN: Yeah, I was kinda good. I was kinda like... I got good grades… I tended to get A's and B's in my grades. I was a straight-A student in Drama and German and Geography, and things like that. And athletics. But I was kind of like the cheeky kid in school. Nothing too malicious… Nothing too nasty… I never really got into too many fights, but I was the practical joker – I'd put drawing pins on teacher's seats and squirt water pistols at people, and invisible ink…
IGNFF: So you knew where to draw the line so you wouldn't get in too much trouble…
MONAGHAN: Yeah, because my dad was a teacher – not at that school, but his brother was a teacher at that school, so my uncle worked at the main secondary school that I went to when I got back, so I couldn't fool around too much. But I would steal sticking-sects from the science lab and put them in girl's handbags – just kind of foolin' around… Tomfoolery… I never got into that much trouble. I got sent to the headmaster for a few things, but I think more than anything my teachers kind of knew that I was more mischievous than malicious.
IGNFF: And what were your creative interests at that time?
MONAGHAN: I think when I was younger I was a lot more manic. Now I've kind of calmed down a little bit, but as a kid I was always the entertainer at family parties. I'd always be the kid up singing and dancing and telling jokes and fooling around, and high energy. I must have been a nightmare for my parents. Moving back to England, I started doing more plays at school. I played the Artful Dodger in Oliver!, and Bugsy Malone… I played Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol. I started to get bitten by the bug a little more seriously. I was then buying books about acting… I was buying a lot of plays, I was buying a lot of screenplays from movies, and acting them out in my bedroom. Just starting to feel it a little bit more. And in my extra-curricular time, I'd be writing plays, or I'd be thinking ideas, or I'd be fantasizing about if I could play Indiana Jones or I could play Han Solo. I started to get involved with youth theater outside of school. The main thing for me every year was the school play, and I very quickly realized that there was no one else in the whole school that was as enthusiastic about doing plays, or as invested in them, you know? I was good at football – you guys call it soccer… I was good at soccer, but I wasn't the best. I was good at geography, but I wasn't the best. With drama, it was just a thing that I knew I could do.
IGNFF: Something you could personalize a bit more?
MONAGHAN: Yeah. I could do it and I wasn't scared. I think a lot of young kids at school are very conscious of trying to keep credibility in case they kind of stand out in a crowd and get bullied by trying to stay cool and stuff. And my whole thing, all the way through school, was I was just a goof… I didn't care. I loved making myself look stupid, I loved fooling around, I loved putting on different voices, and acting up. I used to do impressions of all my teachers at school and certain kids in my classes. The thing that I personally thought was being cool was messing around and goofing off. Whereas I think a lot of kids my age try to stay under the radar by just being quiet and being not someone who stood out. But all I ever wanted to do all the way through school was to be an individual and just stand out.
IGNFF: Do you think that team sports or academic pursuits didn't fuel your need to stand out and develop your personality like acting did?
MONAGHAN: Probably not as much, I don't think. I mean, I wasn't a gifted enough sportsman to be able to show people what I could really do, you know? It also just wasn't something that turned me on as much. I came from a small, kind of close-knit family. I only have one brother, and even though we have a lot of cousins, my immediate family is kind of small. My mom and dad just loved the fact that I fooled around. They just embraced it. They'd always kind of enjoy it, and they liked it when I made them laugh. When we were having dinner or hanging out having a barbecue at the weekend or whatever, they'd like that. I'd be, like, their entertainment. So they completely embraced that side of me, which was really cool, and I think by the time I got to 11 or 12 and I was in school, I just thought, "Well, I'm not scared of fooling around, because I know at home it's really well-received, so I'm just gonna go for it." And also a couple of my drama teachers were really cool with me. They kind of supported me when I was younger, and took me aside and one of them in particular said, "Look, I think you can really do something with this acting. You're really good and you're focused, and you're doing a good performance in this play. I think you could really do something with this." Which was a great motivation, because when I was a kid I thought being an actor was kind of like being an astronaut – it was like a dream. It was like being an archeologist or something – it's a fantasy kind of job that no one ever does.
IGNFF: At what point did you envision it as an actual career path to pursue? And had you entertained anything else?
MONAGHAN: No, I never entertained anything else, I don't think, seriously. Probably from the age of like 12, 13, I thought this is what I wanted to do, but I was kind of embarrassed by it. I didn't know how to approach it. I remember going to the careers advisor when I was like 13, and you have to tell them what you want to do and he gives you advice. I think like 4 or 5 people had gone in before me and said they wanted to be an actor, because by this point me and a few friends were doing a few plays at school and I think they thought it'd be a good job that they wanted to do. And the careers advisor had just said, "Well, you know, I don't advise that. I don't think it's a good idea. Maybe you should do this, or do that." So I went in, and he said, "What do you want to do?" And I said, "I want to be an actor." And he said, "Okay, well, if you want to do that, I think you should try and get an agent and try and do more plays, and read about plays and read about actor's lives." And I remember thinking at the time, "He's told everyone else that it's a bad idea – but he's told me that it's a good idea…" and for a job that 97% of most actors are out of work at any given time, he must have thought that it actually wasn't a bad idea for me. So I think that was another point where I thought, "This could work for me." But I didn't know how to go about getting an agent, or how I started to get up on the ladder. I just didn't know what was required, so I just kept doing plays at school, I kept doing plays outside of school, and writing plays and reading plays, and immersing myself in the industry.
IGNFF: When did the idea of going to college enter the picture? Was it you seeing it as a positive step to gain more training, or was it something you felt you were supposed to do?
MONAGHAN: Yeah, college is kind of… My mom and dad were highly educated people – they've both got a couple of degrees, and my brother has a degree. In my family, it's was not really an option for me to leave school at 16 and try and get a job. I mean, I could have done that, but it's not what you do. You go to college and you continue getting educated, and then you go to university and you do the same thing – and then maybe come out of the education system when you're in your mid-20's. That was the intention. It was a natural sort of process for me. I left school and had applied to college knowing that I wanted to do drama, and then filled up the rest of it with a course in English Literature, and Geography, and then that was it. I was at college, which was kind of weird because by that point, academically, I was starting to not be as motivated as I used to be because I was completely bitten by the bug at this point. So I was getting straight-A's, top of the class, couldn't do anything wrong in Drama, and was getting D's and E's in Geography and C's and D's in English Literature – and my teachers couldn't work it out, because they were seeing two conflicting grades, and I just had no time for anything else other than acting. I was just hell-bent.
IGNFF: And you were aware at the time that you were letting the academic side slip?
MONAGHAN: Yeah, I was, because I was also letting my social life take more control of me. College was a huge time for me to grow and try out new things. I mean, I guess I really started to embrace – by that point– being an individual. You don't have to wear a school uniform at college. You don't have to watch what you say – you can pretty much say whatever you want, and you can give your opinions to your lecturers, a little more informed as a young adult as opposed to a teacher-student kind of thing. So I was now starting to spend a lot more time with girls, and create a bigger social group with a bunch of guys, and… you know… just started to question a few things about the educational system, I guess. I started to lose patience with it a little bit, and probably due to my upbringing with authority and being told what to do and stuff, by the time I really started to turn into the person I thought I was going to be, I'd lost patience with people telling me how I was supposed to behave and how I was supposed to act. So yeah, college was… I think I was gonna fail college, pretty much. My teachers were starting to get a little bit worried, and the dean of the college had a few conversations with me about certain aspects of college life that I was not really that interested in.
IGNFF: What were your parents' thoughts at this time?
MONAGHAN: I'd always probably been a little bit more of a worry to them than my brother. My brother's kind of a straight-A student, very well-behaved, quiet, well-mannered… Just realizes that when you're in the education system, you just put your head down and you work, and then later on in life you plateau. I was always a bit more sporadic, firing off wild shots here and there, so I think I was always more of a worry. But then they also knew that I was clever enough and motivated enough to do something. The main points that they got told by my teachers when they would go in for parents consultation meetings was, "Your son's a clever guy, but he just needs to apply himself and concentrate and make a little bit more effort, and stop putting importance on being a class clown and making people laugh and stuff like that." But I think, looking back on that now, that was me on stage talking to my peers and trying to gain acceptance, and trying to gauge how my schtick was coming off. Because when I was younger, I was much more… Well, I'm still into making people laugh – more than anything else in my life, my favorite thing is to make my friends laugh – but I then got into acting, which is much more of a serious way of expressing something artistically. But I think as a kid, I probably wanted to be a stand-up comedian or a talk show host, or something like that, so I was just trying it all out.
IGNFF: So you were a man in search of a sounding board…
MONAGHAN: Yeah, I think so. And I was also at a point in my life, probably about the age of 14 or 15, where I just knew that I'd never met anyone who was going to be able to shut me up. I was convinced of that – that there's no one yet who has been able to shut me up, that I was always able to come back with something, in any kind of environment. If a teacher was kind of stepped up and was trying to embarrass me or was trying to make me look stupid in class, or trying to make an example of me, I just always had something to come back with. You know? It was the same when I started going to pubs. I was never a big guy in pubs. I was never the main kind of aggressor or anything like that, but I found myself in trouble because I always had a mouth that would come back with something, and there was just never anyone who could make me be quiet – because they'd say something and I'd react, and then they'd say something and I'd react, and then they'd say something and I'd react… I think probably through my upbringing with my parents, my mom and dad had pretty much made me believe that I could do and say whatever I want, and that my opinion is valid. And even as a little boy, they still listened to what I had to say and still wanted to know what I thought about things, and I think that just turned me into – certainly when I was a young man – a kind of pretty cocky individual. IGNFF: Keen to engage in games of verbal one-upsmanship…
MONAGHAN: Yeah… yeah.
IGNFF: Have you met your match yet?
MONAGHAN: No, I still haven't met my match yet. I've got a couple of friends here in L.A. who I hang out with – one guy who's a singer in a band who's pretty good – but we've had a few nights where I've talked about it… because he's had a few nights where he's on form and I've had nights when I'm on form, but I just said to him, "At any given point, we can do it. We can sit down, have a few beers, and just try it out and see if one person manages to crack and just lose their s***."
IGNFF: So what is the prize when someone actually bests you?
MONAGHAN: What would it be?
IGNFF: Yeah… What is the prize for the "Dom Challenge"?
MONAGHAN: See, I don't know. If I was in a bar and I started exchanging wisecracks with someone and they beat me, I guess I'd just really, really respect them and want to hang out with them… Just give them props and hold my hands up and say, "Wow. Okay. Sweet. Here's someone that I've met who's pretty incredible." I mean, Billy (Boyd) is one of the few people in my life that – even though I really enjoy comedy and I really enjoy watching funny films and stuff like that, it's seldom that I'll really lose my s*** laughing… Really tears coming out my eyes, snot coming out my noise, laughing to the point where you can't really breathe and stuff. Billy can do that. Billy has a really beautiful silliness to him, you know? That would be my main kind of way of describing the way that Billy's funny, is that he has a silliness, and a beautiful kind of innocent, silly body language… A fabricated naïve act that isn't real, because he's a wise guy and he's been around for a long time and he knows how the world works – but he puts on this naïve act which is beautiful. He's definitely one of the funniest guys I've ever met in my life, and I think that's one of the reasons why we spend so much time together, because it's always entertaining. We just smile – which I think is one of the best gifts that you can give to a friend… If you can make them feel good and make them feel up about things.
IGNFF: When you talk about having issues with authority figures at various points in your life, what does it take for someone to gain your respect?
MONAGHAN: Well, I've always had a problem – and I still do have a problem – with the assumption of the kind of stereotypical views of young people. I've had a few times of walking into shops where shopkeepers or security guards will follow you around because maybe on this particular day I'm wearing a hooded top, or I'm young and I'm on my own and I'm browsing. I hate people assuming that young people are up to mischief. And if that happens, I always kind of get annoyed with it.
IGNFF: So you dislike people who think in terms of stereotypes…
MONAGHAN: Yeah, stereotypical views of young people as kind of dodgy. I mean, anyone with any kind of un-P.C. opinions really makes me pretty ill. I'm not that keen on listening to any kind of racist or homophobic or sexist kind of jabs. I don't think they really have any place in our generation. I think my generation of people, hopefully – from the people I've met up to now – are quite switched on and quite forward thinking as a generation.
IGNFF: So you just have issues with rigid, inflexible thinking…
MONAGHAN: Yeah. And I have a huge issue with people pushing religious beliefs on to me as well. I guess, to a certain extent, I pretty much know who I am – even though on a daily basis I'm always learning something new – but I kind of know who I am and what I'm into, and what I like about my life and stuff. People pushing their opinions on me in any kind of over-the-top way just makes me feel a little bit ill. But in terms of what it takes for me to respect you, just anyone who's pushing out good feelings. I think I've learned as quickly as possible that if you're good and you're doing the right thing and you're behaving in the correct fashion, then it's gonna fall on your life – it's gonna come back to you and people are going to treat you better. And if you're doing bad things and you're treating people badly – and maybe no one knows about it but you know that you've done something bad – then that's coming back as well. So I'm just interested in surrounding myself with people who are doing the right thing.
IGNFF: Do you think, to some extent, that that kind of give and take is the same as what you'd have to bring to a performance with other actors?
MONAGHAN: Yeah, I do, although I think some of my favorite actors – like Johnny Depp and Daniel Day-Lewis and Gary Oldman, and Tim Roth – I think they're very good with character pieces. So you don't get to know too much about them in particular because all you get to know is the character that they are. You just get to know these people that they play. For me, that would be the purest form of acting and the purest form of actor…
IGNFF: A chameleon?
MONAGHAN: Yeah, a chameleon… Someone who never looks the same twice. Someone who's constantly stretching their repertoire, and is more of a character than a leading man. I appreciate completely what people like George Clooney and Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise are doing – especially Brad Pitt, who I think is an amazing actor – but the people who made me go weak, the people who made me want to become an actor are the character actors… The Daniel Day-Lewises, the Johnny Depps. I think Marlon Brando, to a huge extent, was a character actor who became a leading man. He was able to blend and change and rework his characteristics and was just embraced by actors as the first guy to ever do it. That's what turns me on more than anything about the actors I admire.
IGNFF: When you were in college, where did you foresee your career going? Or did you even envision acting as a career while you were in college? Was that something that was a valid goal at the time, or a pie in the sky?
MONAGHAN: I mean, I do think it was a pie in the sky in terms of me becoming an actor, but I was extremely motivated knew at that point that that's what I wanted to do. From the age of 11 or 12 I wanted to do it, and from the age of 15 or 16 I was gonna do it, you know?
IGNFF: Were you ever disillusioned at any point?
MONAGHAN: You know, I don't think I was, because it was a very fast track for me. I did plays and I did plays and I did plays, and I read screenplays and wrote plays. I hung out with my drama lecturers at college and bent their ear and asked them advice. I didn't get despondent because I'd only just begun, and also, at college, my life was kind of busy. Like I said, I started to hang out with a lot of girls and explore that kind of aspect of my life a lot more. I just kind of started going to pubs, and my social life was incredible – so I was busy, and I didn't have an awful lot of time to get down about it. I was just keeping my head down and trying to stay in a college, because I was loving that time so much… trying not to get thrown out before I got through it. There really wasn't that much time for me to get despondent. I mean, I got bored a little bit…
IGNFF: Bored by waiting for something to happen?
MONAGHAN: Yeah. And also, when it came around to summertime, we had like six weeks off for summer, lots of my friends were really good sportsmen so they'd go off to football camps or training camps for the summer for the sport they were in. I was kind of at a loose end, but unless I was going to give 100% to something, I just wasn't going to get involved – and I wasn't giving 100% to football because my heart was in acting. For a couple of years I really didn't know what I should do in the summer, and then my dad suggested I should join a youth theater over the summer, called Manchester Youth Theater. Which I did, and I also did the National Youth Theater, which was in London. So that was what I did for the summer. But I got bored very quick as a kid – I think I was kind of high maintenance, and always needed new input. We kept reptiles, we kept snakes and lizards, so my days at the weekend were spent foraging around the garden for food for my snakes and lizards. Which then, subsequently, got me really interested in insects, because I started getting more interested in the food that I was feeding my reptiles, and I started buying books about insects and trying to work out where they lived and trying to go to find them, and all that kind of stuff. IGNFF: When you look at the career path that you had, it's interesting to compare it to Billy's career path, which is quite circuitous and had an 8-year divergence into a "proper" career. You got your first professional audition during school, didn't you?
MONAGHAN: Yeah… Just entering into college, yeah. I'd done Manchester Youth Theater and acquired and agent through that, and then I had an audition – it was only the second audition I'd ever had… I'd had one audition for a TV program in England called Cracker, which I didn't get – luckily – and then I had an audition for a TV program called Hetty Wainthropp Investigates…
IGNFF: Which was the Patricia Routledge program, right?
MONAGHAN: Yeah. After 6 auditions, I went down to London on my own and met the director and met the writers and all that kind of stuff, and then eventually got the part. It was only the second audition I'd ever had. So that was me starting. When I was told that I'd gotten the part, I went back and spoke to my mom and dad and said, "What do I do?" And we sat down and had dinner, and my mom and dad said, "Look, you can go back to college… You can repeat your year, you can back a year after that… But you can never do this again. You can never get the opportunity to do this again, so why don't you try this, see how it goes – if it works out, great. If it doesn't, you can go back to college and not waste any time. And you gain a new experience. You've tried it and you've come to a decision." So that was it. I left college for that year and went and did this TV program, and then my career really leapt into gear.
IGNFF: What kind of a learning curve was it to move from stage acting to television acting?
MONAGHAN: Yeah, it was kinda huge. I didn't know how things worked. I arrived at this hotel in North Manchester and checked in, and thought that I had to pay for my room, and the lady was like, "No no – you don't have to pay anything. The company that you're working for pays everything." And I was like, "Oh, okay." So then I went upstairs, and I called someone and I said, "What time am I getting picked up in the morning?" And they said, "Oh, we're gonna send you a call sheet as soon we print them up." And I had no idea what a call sheet was. When he turned up, he had to explain what the call sheet meant and what time I had to be ready and what I needed to bring. Then we went on set that day – I think I got called in for lunch and then I was working straight up till lunch, so I queued in the lunch queue and I got my lunch and I got my money out, and the guy said, "No no – you don't have to pay. It's free." And I was like, "Oh, okay!" And I just kind of hung out… It was kind of freaky. The producer was on set all day which – looking back – was obviously an intentional thing just to make sure I didn't freak out too much. But it was all right. I think there's these huge moments in my life where I'm aware that it could be something truly overwhelming and something that my brain is going to have a hard time processing – so I kind of switch to autopilot, and I just get through it. And I know in that first week or so, I just thought, "This is okay. It's kind of scary, it's kind of a big deal, but it's all right. Just do what you do." And you know what you're doin', so you just have faith in it. I just put my head down, and after the first week it was fine. I came back that weekend – I wasn't supposed to – but I came back home that weekend to tell my mom and dad and my friends all about this incredible adventure I'd just started. And then it just seemed fine from then. It just seemed like a natural transition into the career that I was hopefully destined to always do.
IGNFF: Knowing that you had a learning curve, how accommodating were the other actors that week – especially Patricia?
MONAGHAN: I think Patricia was really good. We had met in the rehearsal process. She was very sweet, she took me under her wing, and she'd say some very cute things. She was the first person to ever say to me one of the greatest pieces of advice I've ever had about acting, which was that I needed to conserve my energy. Because you know, we'd be up at 7 in the morning and we'd be working to 11 at night, and on the drive home I'd be exhausted. I'd be tired, I'd be ratty, and she turned to me one time when we were going back and she said, "Can I give you a piece of advice?" And I said, "Sure." And she said, "You need to conserve your energy more." And I said, "How do you mean?" And she said, "Well, if you watch me, I do my work – but then in-between the scenes I'm just reading the newspaper or I'm resting, or just having a cup of tea and taking it easy. But you're running around and you're chatting to everyone, and you're taking pictures, and you're playing football, and you're doing this and you're doing that." And she said, "That's why you're tired, and it's going to affect your work." And I said, "Okay. Thanks." I went upstairs to my room and I thought about it, and I made a decision there and then – which has happened for the rest of my career – of just to be aware of the fact that the main thing that you need to give your energy to when you're working is your work, and not necessarily to the social aspects of it or the good fun of being on the set. Because that can come after. But when you're working… I mean, I'm involved in an industry that I truly adore and have to do on a daily basis, so I have to pay the respect that it deserves, which is to give it 100% of my energy when I'm doing it – and then enjoy myself after work.
IGNFF: Was there a point after that first week where you definitely felt you could take yourself off of autopilot and be able to make conscious decisions and enjoy the process?
MONAGHAN: Yeah… I mean, like any first week at school, I think you're a bit nervous and everything is new, and you're a bit edgy and you don't know anybody's name. I remember that a couple of the cameramen were really, really nice to me. They said, "Do you want to come and have a look at the shot?" And I'd say, "Yeah…" And they'd put someone else in front of the camera that was supposed to be me, and they'd say, "Look through the eyepiece. Here's the shot. This is how big you are. This is how much of you we see." And I think, in their own gentle way, they were just saying, "This is how it's different from a stage." On a stage, we pretty much get to see the whole entire body. We get to see everything – your whole being. Whereas on camera, certainly for TV, most of the time you get to see from the top of your chest, up. Or the bottom of your neck, up. So it's just that the camera – the eye – is just a little bit closer on you, so I also started to process that kind of theory. And also, once you move into film, you realize that the camera is coming in even closer, and now it's focused on your eyes. So it kind of goes from the whole of your body, to your face, to your eyes in film. These little things, I just started to kind f pick up on them, these processes.
IGNFF: How different is your acting style between film and stage? And how long did it take to get into that groove?
MONAGHAN: It was definitely a transition. I'm yearning to go back to the theater at the moment, and I'm having my agent look for a play for me to do in the early part of next year because I miss it so much. I mean, theater acting for me is the true form. It's the real place where you learn, the place where you practice, the place where you can take risks and try things out, and I think what film acting is is when you've perfected what you're doing and it's a polished piece of work, then you do it on film. And then not only do you do 5 takes of polished work, but then they pick the one take out of all those polished pieces that they feel is the most polished. Whereas in theater, you have the advantage of – not fool around – but play around with the edges a little bit… Try something new. As an actor, it kind of feels to me, when I'm on stage, that I'm flexing all of my acting muscles – whereas in film, which is probably my favorite medium out of the three because of the effect it has on the audience and things like that, you are under a few more rule factors. The camera could be straight in front of you, there could be lights everywhere, there could be people everywhere… It's not real. Whereas when you're on stage, you have the whole stage that you can walk around, you have props that you can pick up, you have people that you interact with for an hour straight. On camera, you may have just come from lunch, and there may be problems with the makeup, or whatever…
IGNFF: Would you say that the emotional investment is greater on the stage?
MONAGHAN: Yeah, I think so. I just think it's more pure. It feels more real.
Continue on to the second installment of Ken Plume's conversation with Dominic Monaghan – in which Monaghan discusses his start in acting, working on The Lord of the Rings, and more.
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