The actor, best known for his role on Shameless, reflects on his most important roles, the value of time, and the emotional responsibility of telling stories.

PHOTOGRAPHY Ilaria Ieie
STYLING Marco De Lucia

Cameron Monaghan, born in 1993, belongs to that rare category of actors who grew up in front of the camera without losing their authenticity. From his childhood and early training in Florida to his move to Los Angeles, his path is one of discipline and talent, a balance that isn&rsquo;t always easy to maintain in the entertainment industry. His breakout moment came with Shameless, where his character Ian had a constant push-and-pull between self-destruction and the desire for something normal.
But, it was the character&rsquo;s relationship with Mickey Milkovich, intense and turbulent, that remains one of the series&rsquo; emotional pillars, and one of the reasons the role became a cult favorite. Then came theater, Gotham and the double life of the Valeska brothers, the Star Wars videogame saga, and the next chapter of Tron, all leading to his newly announced starring role in the upcoming Bosch prequel.

When did your passion for acting begin?
It&rsquo;s something that keeps renewing itself and coming back together continuously, following paths that are never completely linear. I started when I was little, I must have been four or five, between local community theater and a few commercials. The first real leading role I got was with Stuart Little, I think it was during a summer theater camp. But every experience, in its own way, is a rebirth. Every project demands a different register, and we actors aren&rsquo;t empty containers. We don&rsquo;t exist on our own. Every time, you have to understand what ties you to the story, to the character, to the project and to the people who inhabit it, and why you feel the urgency to tell it. It&rsquo;s a process of constant rediscovery. What moves you at four years old has nothing to do with what moves you at fourteen, or at thirty. I&rsquo;m grateful I started so early, because I was able to build a broader perspective and understand that this passion doesn&rsquo;t live or die with a single project. It runs through an entire life.
In your career, which roles do you consider the most meaningful?
I think of an experience like Shameless. I worked on it for eleven years, four or five consecutive months each season, and in that time you live everything life brings with it. You fall in love, you fall out of love, you adopt animals and then you lose them. People you love get sick, then they recover. Life goes on while you&rsquo;re working, and sometimes it reflects on set, other times it stays separate. For me, it&rsquo;s hard to draw a clear boundary between what I live and what I portray. There are projects I hold onto much more than the role I had in them. A film like Jamie Marks Is Dead, for example, didn&rsquo;t reach a big audience, but it took me to Sundance. In certain jobs I found the most important relationships of my life, or I discovered parts of myself I didn&rsquo;t know.

&ldquo;From the set of Shameless, I remember not only the bullshit, the laughs, the cigarettes, but more than anything, their dreams.&rdquo;

What do you carry with you from your years on Shameless?
A lot of my favorite memories are those moments, sitting at Warner Brothers Studios outside the set, where we were learning something new from each other. On that set, powerful personalities lived side by side, from Shanola Hampton to Jeremy Allen White, from Ethan Cutkosky to Emma Kenney, all the way to Steve Howey. I think of them as a kind of extended family, people I learned a lot from about life and about myself. I think my sense of humor comes in large part from them. And I also think that by now, very few things shock me, which is&hellip; useful. I also learned how much you can keep investing in your work and wanting to improve. I remember not only the bullshit, the laughs, the cigarettes, the bottles of water we&rsquo;d throw during the dead moments, but also the deep conversations, their dreams. Artists are complicated people.
Is there a recent project that changed your perspective or taught you something completely new?
I&rsquo;m working on four projects, one that&rsquo;s already public and three that are still secret. All the characters I play have something unresolved or painful. The one I&rsquo;m working on now is the cruelest I&rsquo;ve ever faced, marked by real evil. Maybe it&rsquo;s age, or the world changing, but I see a lot of cruelty around us. And the fact that many friends are becoming parents pushes me to ask what kind of reality their children will grow up in. I&rsquo;m trying to understand the logic that produces real evil, even though it scares me. But I do think an artist has to explore what they&rsquo;re afraid of.

Can acting make the world a better place?
I think it was Roger Ebert who argued that cinema is a real empathy device. The moment you point a camera at something, you give it a perspective. You can bring distant ideas together and make them talk to each other through editing. When you light up a fragment of reality, whether it&rsquo;s beauty or pain, you allow the audience to come into contact with it in a natural way that, in everyday life, would be difficult to sustain. That&rsquo;s how we recognize other people&rsquo;s struggles, their ways of seeing the world. That&rsquo;s why it&rsquo;s essential that many stories exist and many voices exist to tell them. As an actor, you immerse yourself in someone else&rsquo;s vision, you bring your sensitivity, and you build a form of collaboration that gives life to something new.
How do you prepare to play a character?
Understanding where a character comes from is a crucial step. The way they walk, move, speak. Every gesture connects with the rest and helps give coherence to the whole. Context is the key. I usually start from the script, and if I decide to take the role seriously, I reread my part ten or twenty times a day for an entire month. I get to hundreds of readings. At that point, I try to go beyond the literal level and imagine what isn&rsquo;t written but could exist. In film, a character can develop a life of its own. When that happens, you can talk with your co-stars, the director, and the writer, and propose new visions. In recent years, that&rsquo;s the part I love most, when a character comes to life. But it&rsquo;s never linear. You have to leave room for the dream.

Do you see yourself back in theater soon, or behind the camera directing?
I&rsquo;m about to shoot a new series that will keep me busy for months, so I&rsquo;ll only be able to do theater after that. But I love it because it&rsquo;s immediate, you can do something different every night. As for life behind the camera, so far I&rsquo;ve only directed short films, but I want to make my first film as soon as I have time and funding.

GROOMING Jessica Ramundo @ LUIGI RIZZELLO STUDIO
DOP Nicola Cattelan
STYLIST ASSISTANT Cristina Pianta
COORDINATOR Cristiano Spelta @ SCENARIO

Cameron Monaghan on the Actor's Craft, From 'Shameless' to the Upcoming 'Bosch' Prequel

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