Star feels call of home
He still feels the pull of home after a decade in Los Angeles
DOMINIC Monaghan is speaking to the Manchester Evening News from his home in Los Angeles, where he’s lived for more than a decade, via Zoom.
He’s found himself catapulted there from his Stockport home after finding wild fame with his role in The Lord of the Rings, which is soon approaching its 20-year anniversary.
“Manchester is a big deal for me,” he says.
“It becomes even more of a big deal the further you get geographically. The effortless coolness... people’s haircuts, jackets, people’s fashion sense.”
He is hanging onto his Mancunian accent - which he describes as now being “a bit all over the place” - by a thread, having not lived here for 15 years. It’s a topic he endures some “light-hearted” ribbing on from old friends.
During his days at St Anne’s High School in Heaton Chapel, he’d perform in plays such as Oliver and Scrooge and was a member of the Manchester Youth Theatre and the Contact Theatre.
There was a sense among those who guided Monaghan - who was born in Germany before the family relocated to Heaton Moor just before he was a teenager - in his younger years that he did have it in him to “make it”, such was his dedication.
So when St Anne’s careers advisor Mr Brown - who would have to caution other talented students against chasing their dreams and encourage them to prepare backup job opportunities - sat down with a teenage Dom, who said ‘I want to be an actor,’ his response was simple: “He didn’t talk me off the ledge, he just said ‘OK, great.’”
During this period he worked as a waiter at the now-no-longerthere Quincy’s restaurant in Heaton Mersey as well as working jobs at the Stockport mail sorting office and BHS.
Aquinas College in Heaviley, Stockport, beckoned next and through a performance he put on in Bolton, teenage Dom got himself an agent.
An audition in Manchester for Hetty Wainthropp Investigates, a wholesome BBC drama that ran from 1996 to 1998, landed him his first role.
And then came The Lord of the Rings, a generational phenomenon.
His role as hobbit Merry Brandybuck catapulted Monaghan - whose mother was a nurse from Chorlton having trained at Withington Hospital and whose father was a teacher from Fallowfield eternally into the carousel of fame.
He’d have to move to New Zealand, where filming would take place and discover a world beyond that of the Manchester Youth Theatre, Old Trafford and Afflecks Palace which had all played their part in shaping him as a young man.
There was so much to look forward to as he embarked on the adventure, but there was pain to endure, too.
“I had to break up with my longterm girlfriend when I moved to New Zealand,” he says.
“I had to say goodbye to my grandmother who was at death’s door. I didn’t see my parents or my brother for, I think, more than a year.”
A demanding, gruelling routine occupied his mind, however.
“We were just so busy,” he remembers. “[Upon arrival] it was a couple of months of horse riding and sword fighting and dialect coach and line learning and meeting with the cast.
“And once we started shooting, the four hobbits were in first and out last each day. So I didn’t have a massive amount of time to be sad, but there were moments.”
Since the pandemic began, Monaghan has noticed a “massive jump” in the questions he’ll be asked on social media about The Lord of the Rings and Lost, another pop culture phenomenon he’s found himself in.
His explanation? “People are in a lot of anxiety and uncertainty and sometimes what you need is a movie trilogy or a TV show that you know the ending of. So you can just take a breath. And just relax.”
But there is anxiety about returning to “normal” for him.
“I love the job I do and I’m able to financially be OK with ultimately being a year off from my work,” he says.
“I’ve never felt that maybe this isn’t the job I want to do, or maybe I should explore other things, but probably in the last year I probably had more feelings of ‘Do I really like learning lines? Do I really like being on set? Do I really like giving as much as I have to give to a performance?’ I think we have all gone through periods of doubt.
“I’ve lost a lot over the last year. I’ve lost a lot of friends, a lot of connections. I’ve had to be OK with those things.
“But I’ve also gained a lot. I’ve never had more of an opportunity for self-exploration and self-care.
“And you have to always be mining for that diamond in this rough period we’ve gone through. There are things you have to grasp hold of in terms of positivity. It’s just been harder to find them in the last year.
“But they are there.”
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