Earlier this spring, Michelle Monaghan played Jake Gyllenhaal’s quantum love interest in Source Code, subtly grounding Duncan Jones’s trippy sci-fi thriller with her warmth and humanity.
In Marc Forster’s new film Machine Gun Preacher, she’s cast as another man’s rock: Lynn Childers, the born-again wife of Pennsylvania biker Sam Childers, whose insistence on saving his soul started him on the road to redemption as a zealous defender of Sudanese orphans.
At the Toronto Film Festival for the movie’s premiere, Monaghan talked about doing justice to the real Lynn’s faith, Sam Childers’s sense of purpose and how Machine Gun Preacher might help raise awareness of the horrors in Sudan.
Religious characters aren’t always treated well by Hollywood they’re usually portrayed as antagonists or caricatures. What you do in Machine Gun Preacher is different – Lynn’s relationship to her church is an element of her character, rather than her defining quality. How did you develop that? Did you shadow her the way Butler did Sam?
What struck me as the most inspiring thing about Lynn was how grounded and unemotional she was. And I mean “unemotional” in a really respectful way – she is just so grounded in her faith, and has such stoic belief that it allows her to live a life of real inner peace. She said she always knew that Sam would come around.
That couldn’t have been an easy wait, though.
There aren’t a lot of women who would stand by for a couple of years and watch somebody continually harm themselves and their family. [He] really harm[ed] her, emotionally. But she also knew that there was a very, very good person inside, and that she was gonna be there and stick it through. You know, she came from a dark place as well and she turned her life around, so she saw no reason not to believe that he could do the same. And I think that if she hadn’t stuck by him, it would be a different path for him – he would have gone down a really destructive path, and maybe he would not have recovered.
The movie suggests he’d be dead in a ditch somewhere.
Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly right. And so for me, it was a matter of just trying to stay grounded and unemotional. And as an actor, I am an emotional person. Everything about this character went away from my instincts, really, because she is unemotional. I had to remember that I was portraying a person who’s real, and who’s living, and so I had to kind of put all of my ego and instincts aside, and really remain true to who she is. That was the tricky part.
There’s a stillness, a watchfulness to her.
Yes, that’s exactly right. She’s sort of the foundation, I think, of that relationship, and the reason why he can kind of go out and do all that. I always kinda came back to [muttering], “Quiet giant, quiet giant, quiet giant.” And that’s who she is to me. You know that saying, “behind every good man there’s a better woman”? I think that’s very much who she is, and how they are as a couple.
I found it sort of fascinating that Machine Gun Preacher is the story of a man of faith who still kills people without compunction.
It’s a provocative story. His life is very provocative, as is his book. And I think that’s why [Childers’s story] needs to be told. Because life isn’t cut and dry like this. It’s not black and white it’s often very grey. I mean, you can be a good person, you can do wonderful things, but you can still have demons. Most people are flawed in some way or another, and here’s somebody who’s very strong-willed and passionate – he’s a force to be reckoned with, and he’s not ashamed to say what he wants and what he expects. And what he expects is the safety of these children, and what he expects is any supporter of the LRA to be captured or worse, for [LRA leader] Joseph Kony to be brought to justice, one way or another.
These are extraordinary atrocities against men, women and predominantly children. The statistics are staggering. And I think if one were to experience it first-hand, on a day-to-day basis, and to see what really happens, we all might feel differently about it. Over two million people have been killed by the LRA.
That’s almost incomprehensible.
That’s the thing. I was always aware there was a lot of civil war, obviously, within that region, but I didn’t realize the scope or magnitude until I read the screenplay [and] the book, and really started to sit down with [screenwriter] Jason [Keller] and Sam and talk about it. The statistics are staggering. It’s incomprehensible that it’s still going on, and that these people have still not been brought to justice. So if there’s anything that this movie can do, it’s to keep the spotlight on Sudan, and Southern Sudan – I mean, they’re a separate state now, but they’re still fighting for their freedom from the north, and there’s still genocide taking place. We can’t take our focus off that there’s still so many victims of this. This film it’s going to enrage people on a lot of fronts, it’s going to enlighten a lot of people, and hopefully it’ll inspire people as well.
