Michelle Monaghan in Trucker Courtesy of the Tribeca Film Festival

The "underwear scene" in Trucker may soon become famous, if the Tribeca festival indie catches on with audiences. In it, a lonely, self-destructive female truck driver, played by 32-year-old Michelle Monaghan, becomes enraged when her young son (who has been sent to live with her by his dying father as a last resort) leaves the roadside hotel room the two of them are sharing. He is accosted by some local punks and comes back bloodied up. Acting without thinking — a problem that defines her — she darts out of the room and across the street in her panties to go get some payback. Like last year's Gone Baby Gone, Trucker shows Monaghan choosing to flex her dramatic muscles just as she's also quickly ascending to the status of a go-to girl for A-list actioners and romcoms. Made of Honor, in which she and Patrick Dempsey play best friends unaware of their true feelings, opens Friday and Eagle Eye, a $100 million, Spielberg-produced thriller in which she stars as an innocent woman framed as a terrorist, is expected to hit theaters in early fall. Premiere recently sat down with Monaghan to talk about her various projects, dealing with the pressures that come with mega-budget films and the peace and solitude of driving the big rigs.

Congratulations on Trucker. Now if they decide to do a remake of Smokey and the Bandit, it's all you.
Oh, yeah, watch out! Exactly. I should think about that.

The director's mentioned that you felt compelled to learn how to drive one of those trucks before you could play the character. What does that do for an actor, whether it's driving a truck or something like playing the piano? Why not just fake it?
Well, that's the whole point. I never wanted to fake it. That's the whole thing. It's so important to me as an actress for it to be real, to ultimately be an extension of myself.

So that's how you make it interesting to yourself?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's how I looked at this truck, that it's an extension of her as a person. Clearly, this is something that defines her as a woman, as a trucker. Her career, her life revolves around it and all the choices she's made up to that point. So it was really, really important to me to learn how to drive that truck and to have the truck dressed the way we all thought — the inside — all the things she would have in there. I spent some time with female truckers who've been trucking for thirty years. I went on short hauls with them.

Are there a lot of them around?
Yeah, you'd be surprised, actually. Certainly men outnumber women, but women are growing at a really, really high rate. And they're remarkable; they have the best driving records. Is that any big surprise? [laughs] It was just really important to me to immerse myself in the lifestyle, because it really is a lifestyle, trucking.

Michelle Monaghan and Jimmy Bennett in Trucker Courtesy of the Tribeca Film Festival

What habits of theirs did you pick up on?
Well, it's more lingo. For me, it was more emotional, what I learned from them. They're very insightful. They spend a lot of time on their own and they're all incredible free spirits.

When you said lingo, I thought you meant CB culture.
Yeah, there was some CB culture and that's pretty good, but it's funny because they were saying that they're not really on the CBs anymore, really. Now they've all got cell phones and headsets.

That's too bad. Those CBs are great.
I know, I know! I only really learned how to drive a truck so I could do that, let's get real. But I just wanted to know, like how long are they on the road? How often do they shower and eat? Do they sleep in the trucks all the time in truck stops? It was all that. Just to try to get into the mindset of who this person was, I guess. It's a pretty unique character so I really had to figure out and learn as much as I could about her.