Trending:
Michelle Monaghan is opening up about going blonde for The White Lotus — and the major feats it took to sustain her glam look.
Speaking with PEOPLE for her brand-new partnership with U Beauty, the actress, 48, revealed that she was actually nervous to go from her naturally dark brunette look to a glamorous blonde when The White Lotus creator Mike White asked her to do so.
“I’m a dark brunette. And I knew that Mike really wanted me to be blonde. And I was like, ‘Of course I’ll do whatever you want.’ But I was worried because I knew that I was going to have to go back to being brunette for a film afterwards. And I was worried about being blonde and having it maintained for multiple months in Thailand.
Luckily, Monaghan revealed that celebrity colorist Tracey Cunningham took several trips to Thailand, as the anthology series was filming to maintain Monaghan’s color throughout the production.
“I don’t know what we would’ve done there,” she says of Cunningham. “… We were really grateful because my hair actually, despite it being treated so heavily, it maintained its health. And then when I had to go brunette, I went back. She took me back [to brown] and it’s still very healthy.”
On season 3 of the hit HBO series, Monaghan plays a TV star named Jaclyn on a girls’ trip with her longtime friends Leslie Bibb and Carrie Coon at the fictional White Lotus resort in Thailand — and the actress jokes that “it’s very Jaclyn” to have a stylist fly all the way from the U.S. to Asia just to do her hair.
“It was so fun being Jaclyn, because Jaclyn is such a departure from me specifically in terms of look. She likes the makeup, she likes the pink tan, she likes the blonde hair. It’s done. She does herself up. And so it was just a really very fun role too, to inhabit.”
According to the actress, the show’s hair department was also responsible for giving her blonde locks some life that truly made it look like she was on a tropical vacation.
“We made a choice early on in the first couple of days [that] it’d be the first couple of episodes that she would be really making an effort with her hair,” Monaghan reveals, giving some insight into her character. “So her hair is the most kind of done, I think she wears it up and it’s kind of voluminous and stuff. And then we decided as she starts to get a little bit bored at the detox, she just starts to rock that natural texture.”
“We just let it get a little bit dirty,” she jokes. “It follows her journey. So she became sort of less polished.”
Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.
Monaghan has been candid about the intense beauty routine that went into making her look as glamorous as a TV star like the fictional Jaclyn might. Speaking with PEOPLE at a recent New York City event celebrating her as U Beauty’s first-ever brand ambassador, she revealed that she was also self-tanning weekly.
“I committed to it every Sunday,” she tells PEOPLE. “So everybody’s like, ‘We’re going to go down to the beach and for a swim.’ And I was like, ‘I can’t do it.’ Instead, I was putting on the self-tanner and waiting for it to dry for six or seven hours because it was so humid.”
“And it became this ongoing joke that they just knew. They’re like, ‘Oh, don’t bother asking Michelle. She’s doing her tan,'” she continues, joking that it was another way of helping her get into character.
“But once I put that tan on and then that blonde hair and I felt like I was inhabiting a very specific character,” she adds. “And then she wore a very bright pink coral-y nail polish that we would have to do once every week or two.”
The White Lotus season 3 also stars Aimee Lou Wood, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Jason Isaacs and Walton Goggins, as well as Natasha Rothwell, reprising her season 1 role as the luxury resort chain’s spa manager Belinda.
Read the full article here
