Dominic Monaghan on Playing a Creep in 'Pet,' Teenage Crushes, and Drunken Reunions With His Fellow Hobbits
Dominic Monaghan says he’s often asked which of his under-the-radar films would he recommend most. His answer had been the 2008 period horror-comedy I Sell the Dead, in which he played a grave robber on death row who recounts his dizzying life of crime to a visiting priest (Ron Perlman).
Now, however, the 39-year-old Brit and alum of Lord of the Rings and Lost has a different response: his new low-budget psychological thriller Pet, which he describes as “Fatal Attraction meets (500) Days of Summer.” In the film, Monaghan is Seth, a lonely employee at an animal shelter who cooks up a twisted dish of revenge when he’s dissed by Holly (Ksenia Solo), a former high school crush he reconnects with years later.
Monaghan dropped by Yahoo Studios Monday for a Facebook Live interview (watch above), where we talked about Pet, why there are so few female characters on Sesame Street, and a few other random subjects. Some highlights:
He, too, loved Slave Leia. Asked if he had any crushes in high school, Monaghan let his nerd flag fly. “My biggest crush of all time when I was a kid was Princess Leia,” he said. “Carrie Fisher in Star Wars [A New Hope] with the buns and the white dress was beautiful. But obviously by the time you get to the gold bikini [when she was captive to Jabba the Hutt in Return of the Jedi], she’s at the next level.”
He’s never seen the ending of Lost. Monaghan played drug-addled fallen rock star Charlie Pace in ABC’s long-running (and long-debated) hit series, but he avoided the show’s polarizing finale. “I didn’t see it,” the actor admitted, explaining he lost track of the episodes at some point during Season 2 and never caught back up, even though he has had plenty of time. “I mean, how egomaniacal would that be to sit and watch me on the TV? ‘Oh, there’s me. Oh, there’s me again!‘”
He still hangs with the Fellowship of the Ring. Monaghan famously grew close with his Hobbit co-stars Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, and Billy Boyd over the course of filming Peter Jackson’s acclaimed Lord of the Rings trilogy. “I’ll always be tight with those guys, it feels like we went to university together.” He said they keep in touch, and he’s especially close with Boyd, whom he planned to meet for dinner the night of our interview. Though he warned things might get messy while “taking the piss,” as they say, out of his mate: “I have to be careful with Billy, because if I get him in a restaurant and he’s with me, he tends to get blind-drunk and fall asleep in bowls of soup. He embarrasses himself. So we’ve got to keep soup and alcohol away from him.”
Pet opens in theaters and on-demand Dec. 2. Watch an exclusive clip from the film: