Michelle Monaghan wants to clear a few things up. Most importantly, Jaclyn, her character on The White Lotus, is not a “pick me.” At least not on purpose.
“I don’t think she’s trying to be that girl,” she tells me, once I explain the internet term for a woman who’s always seeking male attention. “I think she is someone who makes a moment…I don’t judge her.”
While Monaghan has soft feelings for Jaclyn, many fans of the hit HBO series turned on her after her actions in last week’s episode. Jaclyn, a TV actress who funded a trip to Thailand with her two childhood pals Laurie (Carrie Coon) and Kate (Leslie Bibb), convinced her friends to go out clubbing with staff wellness guru Valentin and his two Russian buddies after growing bored at the luxury resort. This is a window of opportunity for Laurie, the only single member of the trio who Jaclyn has been needling to hook up with Valentin since they arrived.
After the group brings the party back to their villa, though, it’s the married Jaclyn who ends up in bed with Valentin, as Laurie snores in her room. And in this week’s episode, we see that not only is Laurie upset that she was passed over, she’s furious that Jaclyn would betray her.
But was it a betrayal? One of the most fascinating parts of the depiction of the trio is how both history and insecurity shape our friendships, and both Laurie and Jaclyn’s feelings are partly born of their own inner demons. Laurie is hurt and self-conscious that Valentin chose the glamorous Jaclyn, while Jaclyn’s desire to party and hook up seems to have been driven by hurt over being ignored by her much younger husband, Harrison, and wanting to be seen as young and hot.
“I think she got to a point on this trip where she was a little bit over the detox,” says Monaghan. “She needed some stimulation and she needed some validation, and she’s someone who needs that external validation and wasn’t getting it and went looking for it in all the wrong places and just hit the fuck it button and said, I’m going to have a good time tonight. At least one of us is.”
Someone else who is having fun? Monaghan, who’s having a blast being a part of the beloved franchise’s third season and in her new role as the first ever global brand ambassador for skin care brand U Beauty, which was announced last week. Taking the partnership, she says, was a no-brainer, as she (like our editors!) already was a huge fan of the brand and its approach to skincare at every stage of life.
“I feel like we’re in this weird cycle as women and as on podcasts and on social media that we’re just constantly just looking at youth and not embracing the age that you are,” she says. “That’s one of the things that I like about U Beauty. Aging isn’t linear, it’s different for everybody, and I feel like it’s really, it’s celebrating that. I honestly feel more in my skin now at this age.”
Monaghan chatted with Glamour about what we can expect from the rest of the season, her IRL group chat with her on-screen besties, and that all-to-real Trump scene.
Glamour: I think a lot of fans are going to have strong feelings about episode six of The White Lotus, where Laurie confronts Jaclyn about hooking up with Valentin. Are you bracing yourself to see the hate for your character?
Michelle Monaghan: It’s so funny. Even a couple of my friends are like, oh my God, I hate Jaclyn now. And then I have friends that are like, Jaclyn, go get yours. It’s that idea of how it triggers you, because it sets up a mirror. The relationship is so relatable and we all know a Jaclyn, or you’ve been a Jaclyn, or you’ve been burned by Jaclyn. I think that people feel very connected to that dynamic right now so they feel it’s a betrayal.
For me, playing a character who makes that choice, I don’t judge her. I feel like it was something that wasn’t manipulative or malicious. I think she sincerely really wanted Laurie to have a hookup, and Laurie didn’t have a hookup that was Laurie’s choice. And she’s like, Hey, I’m like, I’m having fun out here. I am just going to finish off the night like this. I think that she wakes up with the intention of probably telling the girls of what she did, and she’s not thinking it’s really a big deal. And then she quickly finds out that it is a big deal and the ladies really perceive it as a betrayal and it triggers things from their past.
You can totally see Jaclyn as the popular one who was pushing the other girls when they were in high school.
You see the high school friendship. And I think that was another interesting thing that Mike wanted to tap into. He was like, you have a shared history, but you all have different versions of what that shared history was and memories of that shared history.
Speaking of high school, I was curious where the friends were from. Do you know?
We were thinking the Midwest because we all went really different directions. Like Kate went to Austin, Laurie to New York. So their values changed all dramatically.
That was my guess too, a swing state.
Yeah. It’s funny. One of the first things that we did as a trio when once we realized we were all in our respective roles, we started our group chat. We said, let’s all share a picture of us when we were 14. We were trying to really create our own backstory and have a sense and idea of who we were. We shared stories about all of those experiences that you tick off as young adults and really tried to get to know each other personally. So when we all arrived in Thailand, it was really special.
We still have it going on. I woke up this morning to, I don’t know, a Carrie or Leslie voice note, and I haven’t had a chance to read it.
That’s amazing, I love that.
It’s always good. It’s always coming up. I think Carrie sent me something the other day. She was like, oh my God, I loved your seduction scene of Valentin.
I’m also glad to hear there’s just one group chat, not three separate ones where you can all talk shit about each other.
Exactly. No, we are all in.
So what do you think Jaclyn’s motivation was in hooking up with Valentin, if she wasn’t being a pick me?
My inspiration for her was a butterfly. Sometimes with certain roles, I’m like, if she were an animal, who would she be? She was a butterfly because she’s very colorful and very vibrant and has a lot of energy. She comes into a room and demands attention because of her energy. But beyond that, a butterfly’s life is very short-lived.
I feel like she inhabits that idea because she’s an actress and she’s so focused on youth and beauty and she still wants to be young and hot and fun. Those are her things that she’s fearful of. Those are real things. I don’t know if it’s necessarily any kind of specific to male validation, but I think because it’s her line of work she is used to getting attention.
Do you think she was feeling insecure? Especially after being sent to the old people pool in episode five?
Yeah. I love that scene. I love episode five because she’s affected and I love that we got to see her really kind of lean into how affected she is. There was a scene that was cut out where we look like drowned rats from the Songkran Festival, and we went to the club and the three women that you see in the dancing scene were making fun of us (coincidentally, I had my U Beauty Plasma Lip Compound in my purse for the scene).
And I’m like, fuck this. We got to get ourselves cleaned up. We got to get our shit together. We all hightail it to the bathroom at the club. And there’s this whole scene, this montage where we’re all fixing each other. It’s a real mission that we are on. We’re like, we’re going to go show them. So then when you see us at the club, I clock them and then I’m like, yeah, look at me now. So actually, it’s not about the guys.
Well, it’s always about wanting to look good for other women, right? So you don’t judge Jaclyn’s actions?
I don’t judge her. It is hard. But listen, I love what everyone is doing. I love how she’s a mirror to everyone else. Some people are like, they love her for just being her. And then others are just like, yeah, she wouldn’t be my friend. That’s not the gal that I want.
I think the whole time she was like, Laurie, hook up with him. You should have hooked up. You should have hooked up with two of them, or at least one of them. There’s another scene that was cut for time where she calls Harrison again. He doesn’t pick up, and then it’s like, alright, I guess he’s just gone AWOL completely. I guess I’ll call Valentin. He’s the butler, right? It’s not like Laurie’s husband. It’s not like they had a relationship at all.
Yes, the mysterious Harrison. What’s your take on that relationship?
Mike [White, the show’s creator and writer] and I were always sort of wondering, does she have a monogamous relationship? Maybe they don’t have a monogamous relationship. And Mike’s like, I think that it’s a little fluid and that kind of tracks for me.
I also personally loved the Trump conversation in episode three. It felt so real, especially in 2025.
The Trump scene is so good and we knew that. That’s the genius of Mike, right? At that point in time, nobody knew that Donald Trump would be running for reelection, let alone elected. And so after that was all sort of said and done and we were like, oh my gosh, this is going to hit different.
Oh yeah, it hit real different.
It hit real different. These are conversations that are happening all over the country and the discovery of friends, differing political views and things like that. I think that’s what also makes the show so relatable, when you get yourself into that kind of conversation or you’re learning something new about a friend, you don’t quite know what to say. So you’re sort of reacting with a pregnant pause or you’re making eyes or a kicundern the table. Moving on, you’re trying to gracefully figure your way through the situation, but you know that you’re going to have that text exchange or that phone call be like, oh my God, what was she talking about? I had no idea.
Scenes like that have become real talkers. Why do you think these three women are resonating so much with the audience?
Well, people can have long time friendships and just because you have a shared history doesn’t necessarily mean that you haven’t gone off and had different life experiences that inform your values or your choices and things like that. There are those heightened qualities that Mike loves to lean into, which is kind of that toxic positivity that exists specifically within this friend group. But I think what was really important for him to explore, and he was really keen to dissect, was his own experience, witnessing friends, specifically female friends that he’s seen on vacation. He was like one person would leave and then the other two would start chatting. Why is it that women do that? And I’m like, we are socially kind of conditioned to do that.
I think it starts with, firstly, the kinds of pressure and judgments that we put on ourselves ultimately then reflect on judgment on others. We spoke to him a lot about enduring that as a woman feeling those pressures and the ways in which we also perpetuate it and that we’re guilty of it. What he does so well within this trio, and in a number of characters in multiple seasons, is he puts a mirror up to all of us, and it’s quite triggering and confronting and vulnerable. But it’s also a reminder to not be that person, that there are more valuable takeaways in a friendship as opposed to cutting each other down or gossiping. And that reminder that there’s space for all of us and that we can all be celebrated, I think is really important. And I think as you start to, as you’ve seen in episode six, we start to see the ladies kind of evolve.
For one, Jaclyn finally calls them out for gossiping about her.
She calls them out!
Any hints you can give us for the finale?
Well, I can tell you that the fans will be very, very surprised. Mike White just does it again in terms of the ending. The first half of the season is so strong, but Mike is so smart about pacing in the way that he sets up story and dynamics, the personal relationships and all that, that you really feel so invested in each and every character. And then the payoff in the back half of the season, which just propels you into the finale, which is just so intense. He’s a genius. He knows exactly what he’s doing.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The post Michelle Monaghan Just Wants Justice for Jaclyn appeared first on Glamour.
