Trucker or lover, she’s in the driver’s seat

Three weeks after wrapping “Made of Honor,” in which she plays the well-scrubbed best friend-true love of the equally well-scrubbed Patrick Dempsey, Michelle Monaghan got behind a big rig (sans makeup, save some bronzing) for the low-budget independent film “Trucker.”

The movie, which premiered last week at the Tribeca Film Festival, in search of distribution, was just the sort of no-frills experience “Made of Honor” was not.

“Made of Honor,” a Sony release opening Friday, includes fancy costume changes and an outre-scenic wedding at an idyllic castle on Scotland’s Isle of Skye. Monaghan is the bride-to-be and, as the comedy-romance formula goes, the indefatigable best friend of the dashing, splendidly single Tom (Dempsey), who doesn’t realize she’s the one he wants until Hannah makes him her maid of honor.

“Trucker” was shot in Granada Hills and Riverside and along the Grapevine, over 18 days. In it, Monaghan plays Diane Ford, bitter and stubborn and fiercely solo. She does her long hauls, then comes home to sleep it off before doing it all over again. There are no Isle of Skye weddings, just one-night stands in motels and an estranged 11-year-old son who comes back into her life.

“She makes no apologies for herself,” Monaghan said over breakfast recently in SoHo. “She is what she is. She’s OK with that. She’s not a victim and that’s really, really what I loved.”

You could see Susan Sarandon playing a tough-minded female trucker in a film whose style, writer-director James Mottern said, was influenced by nuanced, beloved movies of the 1970s such as “The Last Detail” and “Five Easy Pieces.”

Mottern said his female trucker character began with a woman he saw at a truck stop in Riverside -- a “beautiful woman, bleach blond . . . skin tanned to leather, walked like a Teamster, blue eyes.”

That’s not Monaghan, freckle-faced, with brown hair, but what Mottern saw in the actress was a head on her shoulders and a sly danger. They met in the lobby of a Beverly Hills hotel in 2006, when Monaghan was working on the Farrelly Brothers’ remake of “The Heartbreak Kid.”

“And, of course, she comes out and she’s just a knockout,” Mottern said. “But there’s something very dangerous about her at the same time. Anything will come out of her mouth.”

Still, Monaghan seems an unlikely choice for Diane. At 32, the former model from Iowa has more often been used in glam roles (she was the ingenue in the neo-noir “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang”) or as girls next door (see “The Heartbreak Kid” or “Made of Honor”).

But Mottern was impressed with her work in “North Country,” where she played a female miner dealing with sexual harassment on the job opposite star Charlize Theron.

That role came to Monaghan after she lost out to Anne Hathaway for one of the costarring parts in “Brokeback Mountain.” The next week, she said, she got “North Country.”

“Trucker” is a small film, and mostly a character piece, from a first-time feature director, but it’s Monaghan’s first starring role. For the movie, she got her trucker’s license and went on a few trips with female truck drivers.

“I sort of made a deal with myself, that if I wasn’t able to get my license then I wasn’t going to do the movie,” she said.

Showing her softer side

The only trucks in “Made of Honor” are the ones that hauled the equipment to various locations. Here Monaghan is playing a familiar Hollywood role -- the best friend of the confirmed bachelor (Dempsey) who can’t see that the woman for him is standing right in front of him.

There is chemistry on-screen, though, and it is Monaghan’s job to look pretty without seeming hot (not unlike in “Trucker,” come to think of it).

But “Made of Honor” is Dempsey’s movie, not Monaghan’s -- he is, after all, McDreamy of the ABC hit “Grey’s Anatomy.” Even the billboard acknowledges Dempsey’s drawing power over his costar: His face occupies the frame, while hers is half out of it.

“Most women in America would prefer to see Patrick’s face,” Monaghan laughed. “His beautiful baby blues. Listen, I’m just happy to have half my face on it. It’s a start, right?”

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paul.brownfield@latimes.com