From 2002-2009 audience members got to know Adrian Monk, the brilliant former San Francisco detective battling an obsessive-compulsive disorder played by Emmy winning actor Tony Shalhoub in the TV series Monk. Almost 15 years later, the Andy Breckman-created series gave fans what they have been asking for, a view of Monk navigating a life of a pandemic in the film Mr. Monk’s Last Case: A Monk Movie, which premiered on Peacock on December 8, 2023.
The film finds Monk in a dark place tackling mental health issues with thoughts of suicide. Monk creator Andy Breckman shared with Popternative how he balanced the dark issues with humor in the film “Well, it was a challenge of course, but you know you want your character in any drama to be in crisis and need to go on a journey,” Breckman told Popternative correspondent Helen Roumeliotis. He added, “So, we had Monk start in a pretty dark place. The template I used was Frank Capra’s movie It’s a Wonderful Life which the arc of the [Monk] movie sort of follows very roughly the arc of that movie, and it was encouraging and when I was pitching it to Tony I used It’s a Wonderful Life to prove that such a witch’s brew is possible. You could have a character in a dark place and still have an uplifting message and uplifting movie.”
Later in the interview, Tony shared how he prepared playing a darker Monk in Mr. Monk’s Last Case:
“Well I had a lot of preparation in the sense that Andy and I and two other exec producers, our director Randy Zisk, and the co-creator David Hoberman, we all were as a team we all kind of talked about Andy’s story. When we got the first script we talked about the kind of message and shape, so I had a long, long you know, good period of a number of months to live with the idea and the more I delved into it and the more we talked about it, the more I liked the idea of Monk being in such a dark place. It made sense and it was reflective of where people’s heads were after the pandemic. I mean the pandemic set a lot of people back and people lost family members and friends. There was a lot of darkness there and so I felt that it would be relatable to have our super sensitive character of Adrian Monk in such a dark and devasted position to start the story.”
Watch the full interview with Tony Shalhoub and Andy Breckman below.
Mr. Monk’s Last Case: A Monk Movie is available to stream on Peacock.
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