‘It Was Very Complicated,’ Michelle Monaghan Says Of Portraying Twins In ‘Echoes’

In the limited NetflixNFLX
series Echoes, Michelle Monaghan portrays twins who swap lives and then impersonate one another. Other actors have played twins, but these roles were unique, and she explained how she did it.

“It was very complicated,” she laughed in a phone interview. “I joke, but it was pretty serious! I went to Staples and bought a lot of highlighters, paper clips and post-its!”

The seven-episode thriller centers around two identical twins, Leni and Gina McCleary, who share a dangerous secret. Since childhood, they have secretly swapped lives, culminating in a double life as adults. They share two homes, two husbands, and a child, but everything in their perfectly choreographed world is thrown into disarray when one of the sisters goes missing.

Monaghan needed to be organized to tackle this project. She color-coded her scripts and clipped certain scenes together to keep things in order. “The paper clips helped with the scenes because the story is not told linear, and we were shooting out of chronological order. The level of difficulty got greater and greater.”

“Each sister had a color. Leni was blue, and Gina was pink and orange,” she tells me, adding that carrying around these color-coded scripts became her lifeline. “Anything to help me function throughout this project because it is quite nuanced, right?” She quickly came up with a system and a plan. “I had to compartmentalize each character, and the only way to do that was to flesh them out individually.”

At its center, this story delves deeply into childhood trauma. In developing Leni and Gina, Monaghan focused on one poignant commonality. “They shared the foundational trauma of losing their mother when they were young, and each daughter remembers that differently, and those memories informed their respective lives.”

First, she fleshed out the character of Leni, and when she felt she was in a good place with her, she delved into Gina. “No person can imitate another person perfectly, so therein lies the way to make unique characters out of both,” she explained. “My goal was to protect the integrity of each woman while also having empathy and compassion for them.”

There’s often the good versus evil twin aspect, but for Monaghan, there wasn’t a clear delineation between Leni and Gina. “I didn’t want to deduce them into one is good, and one is bad. I always wanted their emotional truths to be foundational to the trauma because that was the motivational factor. And we had to show the bond that they shared.”

It was essential to Monaghan that each sister was a unique character. “I wanted to make sure both women felt different energetically. That was my goal. It was challenging, and I lived in a constant state of fear and anxiety while filming.”

She paused when asked if she favored playing one sister over the other. “It’s like picking a favorite child…it’s almost impossible. I liked playing Leni because I enjoyed leaning into her southern charm. As far as her arc, we see her devolve as she learns things about her past she never knew, and that was challenging to play. As for Gina, I loved the hair, makeup and clothes! Each had beautiful and very different lives, and it makes sense that they’d want to switch every year on their birthdays.”

She said portraying these conflicted sisters demanded a lot from her mentally, emotionally and physically. “I knew it was very ambitious, but I had no clue just how demanding it would be. I was so laser-focused. This project demanded 100% of my attention. I worked seven days a week. God bless my husband and children for being so understanding.”