It’s safe to say that Michelle Monaghan has starred in a new Netflix series. Echo”, required twice as much work from her. Monaghan stars as twins, Gina and Lenny, in the seven-episode thriller.
“It’s a lot. It’s very, very much,” the actor said, laughing, in a recent interview. “It was an intense project, as you can imagine. You know, it’s like doing double duty, really, but that’s also the reason I wanted to do it, because it was a challenge that I obviously hadn’t explored before.”
On “Echoes,” which begins airing Friday, Gina and Lenny aren’t just twins with a sixth sense or a close bond, they share everything, so much so that they switch personalities every year on their birthdays. This means they share jobs, friends, unsuspecting husbands and children. As Lennie, she is alone in West Virginia, raising horses and having a daughter with her husband, played by Matt Bomer. The other lives a fast-paced life in Los Angeles with her therapist husband (Daniel Sunjata).
Their (twisted) ritual hits a major snag when Lenny goes missing and Gina must return home to join the search. Flashbacks show their childhood and youth and what made them change identities in the first place.
Monaghan says she studied the twins in preparation for the role and learned that there was an identity shift.
“I learned that there is a lot of identity switching going on. People tend to do it as twins when they’re kids, you know, do it experimentally, I guess for fun or to keep out of trouble. And they switch, and they do the thing, and they think it’s fun. They play pranks on people. And then there are some other stories where, you know, people do it as adults and maybe in a more sinister, manipulative way.”
Monaghan is not the first actor to play twins on screen. Memorable examples include the 1961 film The Parent Trap starring Hayley Mills as identical sisters and the 1963 television series The Patty Duke Show starring Patty Duke as identical cousins. These projects used split screens to shoot scenes with both actors. In 1998, Lindsay Lohan starred in a remake of The Parent Trap, using stills and a body double.
A motion-control camera was brought in for “Echoes,” and Monaghan says she herself switched between Gina and Lenny “several times a day.”
“It allowed us to just put both women side by side and you could see them really flawlessly,” Monaghan explained.
“I would just play one character for a few hours, and I would work alongside a wonderful actress who played the opposite character. So when I was playing Lenny, she was playing Gina for me, and then I’d finish that character and go and change my hair and makeup and wardrobe for an hour and then come back and do the other side of it. And we did it sometimes a couple of times a day.”
Vanessa Ghezzi, the show’s creator, executive producer and writer, said that it was “still thrilling” to watch Monaghan’s abilities, as well as the work of the visual effects department, and that the end result lived up to her “earliest visions for the show”.
“Watching a talented actor at work is a joy, and watching Michelle Monaghan split herself in half to inhabit two complex, identical women was perhaps doubly so. Especially for Michelle, it was a huge task: playing two main roles for seven episodes is not only an acting challenge, but also a production marathon. She approached her work with passion, generosity, courage and kindness.”
Monaghan also recently filmed the Apple TV+ series “Bad Monkey” in Miami, based on the 2013 novel by Carl Hiassen. Created and written by Bill Lawrence, it stars Vince Vaughn, Jodie Turner-Smith and Meredith Hagner.
Monaghan is looking forward to seeing people’s reactions to Echoes and says watching the show is “a real journey”.
“It’s hard to watch yourself once, but to watch yourself twice is a lot. But I loved it, I had so much fun.”
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