Fourteen years in the past, Tony Shalhoub stated goodbye to certainly one of his most beloved creations — the obsessive-compulsive personal detective Adrian Monk. Monk’s final TV look in 2009 was even referred to as “Mr. Monk and the End.”
There was discuss through the years of a possible reboot and a few potential scripts had been floated. But Shalhoub stated there wasn’t sufficient of a compelling motive to return to his phobia-obsessed character.
Then the pandemic hit.
Monk immediately wasn’t the one germaphobe wiping down their groceries, stocking up on antibacterial wipes and shuddering on the sight of crowded locations.
“Monk, in a way, was the canary in the coal mine,” Shalhoub tells The Associated Press. “He appeared so out of contact and so neurotic and so forth. The pandemic was the nice equalizer. Everybody obtained to kind of see the world via Monk’s eyes.”
Viewers have caught up with Monk and so followers get one other goodbye with the 90-minute “Mr. Monk’s Last Case: A Monk Movie” streaming on Peacock.
Shalhoub reunites on a brand new homicide case with a millionaire because the prime suspect and unique stars Ted Levine, Traylor Howard, Jason Gray-Stanford, Melora Hardin and Hector Elizondo.
Shalhoub laughs that when the rock band Eagles obtained again collectively in 1994, founding member Glenn Frey stated they’d by no means broke up, they only took a 14-year trip. “That’s how I felt at the first table read when we all got back together again. We just kind of folded right back into it.”
Monk helped the San Francisco Police Department resolve crimes as a result of his fixations allow him to watch issues that others overlook. He walked away after fixing his final case — the homicide of his beloved spouse.
When we reconnect with Monk, it’s current day and he is emerged from the pandemic, having spent most of it in a full protecting swimsuit and utilizing in-home fast checks each 20 minutes. Outside, hand sanitizer use is booming. “Everyone is you,” he’s advised. “They’re gonna hate it,” he replies.
Monk is in a moody place, now not detecting and lonely. He wrote a memoir however burned via editors and ghost writers. His obsession with particulars — together with 9 pages a few suspect’s vacuum cleaner — has prompted his writer to scrap the e book and ask for his advance again. So Monk is reevaluating his life and his profession.
“When we’re young, everything’s in front of us. And then when we’re in our middle ages, we feel more settled in the present. But then as we move beyond that, we mostly are looking backwards. We’re looking behind us and we’re reassessing and reevaluating,” Shalhoub says.
“You know, ‘What have I done? What has been my footprint and my impact?’ And I think that’s exactly where Monk is: ‘What has all this meant? What have we really accomplished?’ That further perpetuates these very dark thoughts that he’s having.”
Shalhoub collected three Emmy Awards for his work as Monk over eight seasons. After the present led to 2009, Shalhoub went on to earn three Tony Award nominations, successful in 2018 for “The Band’s Visit” and starred in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” successful one other Emmy.
He suspects Monk — an unlikely hero in these Marvel days — has been embraced by legions of followers as a result of he has flaws and insecurities, however manages to push via them.
“He uses them and turns them into an asset. Actually, for Monk, they become this superpower in a way,” Shalhoub says. “He doesn’t know where he fits into the general society. So he’s kind of always sort of like walking alongside of humanity and society. Maybe that also makes him a bit relatable.”
He provides: “I always hear about adolescents and young teens relating to him, too, because that’s such a time of life being feeling socially awkward and feeling you’re not really a child, you’re not really a grown up.”
Shalhoub additionally suspects there’s a bit OCD in all of us, whether or not it is being aggravated by the location of one thing or an odd interplay on the road that sticks in your head.
“Maybe it’s a crooked picture frame on a wall. Not all of us may go over and straighten that frame, but good luck trying to keep your eyes off of it, you know?”
The debut of “Mr. Monk’s Last Case: A Monk Movie” begs the query — is that this actually a last goodbye to Monk? Shalhoub is not positive.
“I thought the door was closed. I really did for a lot of years. But now that we’ve cracked it open, I’m just going to leave that door open,” he says. “I believe the subsequent one must be referred to as ‘Monk’s Really, Really Final No Kidding Case – This Time We Mean It’ or one thing like that.”
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