“I think it’s really good to get the adrenaline pumping,” says Maika Monroe—actress, professional kiteboarder, brave adventurer. “Do stuff that scares you on a regular basis. I think it’s good for the body and for the mind.”
Monroe is specifically talking about skydiving. She celebrated her 23rd birthday by breaking the sound-barrier from 13,000 feet. She could also, fairly, be describing her maturing roster of movies. In 2014, Monroe starred in two acclaimed horror movies back-to-back, The Guest and It Follows. This summer, she faces two different impending world-invasion apocalypses in Independence Day: Resurgence and The 5th Wave.
Before she started acting, Monroe was a professional kite-boarder—the sport where you stand on a board in the ocean, steering with a high-flying kite, and doing all sorts of jumps and tricks. “After school my dad would pick me up and we would go straight to the beach. The other thing I loved is that no other girls were doing it,” she says. “I would be the only girl out there.”
She was also one of the few women on the set of the second Independence Day, where she got along best with Jeff Goldblum. “We’re BFF, big time, oh yeah!” she says. “I think he’s a magical person, I’m pretty sure he has hidden super powers.” Even with some 18-hour days, Goldblum was a source of positivity. “He’s so positive all the time. He would sing and dance and play games, and dancing—he loves tap dancing. We would be singing Frank Sinatra, Patsy Cline, stuff from plays that I had no idea what they were, but he knows all the words.”
Though she’s in six movies in 2016 (six!), she found time for vacations. Or rather, by “vacations,” she means pursuing extreme sports and other high-flying adventures. For her next pursuit, she says, “I really want to go swimming with sharks.”
“To this day I haven’t seen Jaws,” she adds. “Because I was always in the ocean, when I was a kid my mom said, ‘See the movies that you want to, but I’m telling you, do not ever see Jaws.’”
So she wants to swim with sharks, but still won’t see Jaws? “Yes. Precisely, precisely,” she says laughing. “I think it’s good to conquer the fears.”