Not champagne or sailing: These are Michelle Monaghan’s summer plans “drinking beer outside, playing cornhole…”

Michelle Monaghan is quite the Hollywood star these days thanks to her roles in the “Mission Impossible” film series and numerous TV shows, including “True Detective,” “The Path” and, most recently, “The White Lotus”.

Yet the 49-year-old has revealed that, despite her status, she hasn’t strayed too far from her Midwest roots, as evidenced by her typical summer plans. They are, however, rather different to what they used to be growing up.

Appearing on the “Late Late Show” in 2018, the farmer’s daughter reminisced about the unlikely way she spent those long, summer nights in her hometown of Winthrop, Iowa, which had a population of 740 when she was a youngster.

Michelle Monaghan’s hog wrestling past

“We had this thing growing up at the country fairs that you would sign up to wrestle a hog.

“For year after year, in the summer, I would be maybe 12, 13, 14, you’d grab a gal or a partner or somebody, and you’d have a big, big metal pen probably, I don’t know, about 20 feet in diameter, and they have a big hog in the middle with a barrel, and it was full of about a foot of mud. And they’d start the clock, and you ran around chasing the hog – believe it or not, I did it – and you grab the hog.

“You pick up the hog by all fours, and you dump it. The poor hog, I feel terrible now - I do love bacon - and then you dump it and, apparently, I’m quick in mud”, Monaghan laughed.

Monaghan’s Iowa roots

Three decades later, the actress still returns to Iowa every summer with her husband and two children to spend time with her parents. However, hog wrestling isn’t usually part of her plans, she recently told The New York Post’s Alexa magazine.

“Drinking beer outside, playing cornhole, lightning bugs, s’mores - that’s my jam, that’s my speed”.

You can take the girl out of the deep Midwest…

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