‘A Complete Unknown’ Star Monica Barbaro Is Still Obsessed With Joan Baez

When Monica Barbaro went to the Oscars with the rest of Top Gun: Maverick’s cast in 2023, she made sure to take in the moment. “I was like, ‘I may never attend this event again,’” she says. “You want to be hopeful. You want to believe it could happen, but it’s very rare to get to be in that room…. There’s been so much working against me in this that I don’t take things like that very lightly.”

A Complete Unknown. Barbaro admits she still hasn’t quite wrapped her head around the nomination, much less what she plans to wear or who she’ll bring to the show on March 2.

“Someone asked me who my plus-one is, and I’m not kidding—even at industry parties, I have not, prior to now, really gotten a plus-one,” she says. “I’ve gotten really good at showing up solo and navigating that, and now I’m like, ‘I get to incorporate someone in my world into this.’”

When we hop on a Zoom, Barbaro, who is also nominated for a SAG Award, is in London filming her next movie, a crime film helmed by Bart Layton. She’s also just days away from another major milestone: finally meeting Baez in person. She plans to fly to San Francisco, where Baez is being honored on February 8, and even though she’s communicated with the folk star, she’s still intimidated. “I feel nerves when I see her name light up on my phone,” Barbaro says. “I hope I don’t just start crying or something. I’ll try to keep my cool.”

At least she doesn’t have to worry about what Baez thought about her performance. “I loved what she did in the film,” Baez told the Marin Independent Journal. “If I didn’t think she was good at it, I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed it in general. But she looked enough like me and she had my gestures down. You could tell who it was. She worked so hard. Kudos to her for taking the role on.”

Barbaro plays Baez in the early to mid-1960s, when she first met Dylan. At the time, Baez was already a celebrated musician, and she helped Dylan’s rise to fame by recording some of his songs and performing with him. Their musical and romantic connections are central to the movie’s story, as these two artists move in and out of each other’s lives.

Barbaro captures not only Baez’s voice, musical style, and stage presence, but her self-assured nature. For the transformation, Barbaro studied Baez’s music and life, learned to play guitar and sing, and wore fake teeth while filming. The most valuable insights came from Baez herself. “I cried a lot when we got off the phone the first time, because just hearing her voice, there was an intimacy to it for me that was just crazy,” she says. “When you obsess over someone, when you study someone so intensely, it becomes a part of you in a way.”

Barbaro grew up in Mill Valley, California, where she was very focused on ballet. She studied at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she dove more into modern dance and the mind-body connection. But when she graduated, she decided that she wanted to focus on acting. “I didn’t feel like it was my personal most authentic form of expression,” Barbaro says of dance. “I remember when I went into my first acting class and I was like, ‘This fits. It just makes sense in a really beautiful way.’”

She went back to California, where she booked small commercials and TV shows. Her first major role was on the second season of the Lifetime television series Unreal, and she later joined the NBC legal drama Chicago Justice and appeared on Netflix’s The Good Cop. Top Gun: Maverick, where she played naval aviator Lieutenant Natasha “Phoenix” Trace, was her first major studio movie role, and got her noticed by the industry. It also allowed her a new level of confidence. Soon after, Barbaro was offered the co-lead role in the Netflix series FUBAR (opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger) without having to audition. “I was able to show up with a different sense of self and certain self-certainty on that,” she says.

Barbaro was actually filming A Complete Unknown and FUBAR at the same time, which could have created a strange juxtaposition for her—bouncing from a period folk drama to an action spy comedy. But stepping in and out of Joan actually enriched her performance in A Complete Unknown. “I do think the scenes that I filmed toward the end of the process, whether that was just more time spent as her or whether it was like the fluctuations and letting it go and then coming back to it, those I think were the better scenes of my work in the movie,” she says.

The last scene she filmed was when Baez and Dylan are in Dylan’s apartment, and he plays “Blowin’ in the Wind” for her. It’s one of the most intimate moments of the movie, as Baez joins in singing one of Dylan’s most iconic songs. “There was just a comfort level there,” Barbaro says. “Even though you’re playing two people who don’t know each other, as actors, you need that comfortability.”

After she wrapped, Barbaro had two hours to pack up and get on a plane to continue filming FUBAR. “I was just in my hotel room, I think it was 4 a.m., and just cried,” she says. It wasn’t exactly easy to let go of such a life-changing filming experience, one that let her dig so deeply into a character. But Barbaro hasn’t let all of Joan go. She still plays guitar, and has been writing songs as well. “When I play it, I feel like I get to go back into a creative space that I really fell in love with working on this film,” she says. “It feels like a sanctuary with the instrument and almost spiritual.” For now, the songs are just for her. “Who knows what I do with it?” she says. “It feels very, at times, therapeutic.”

Barbaro also travels with the thumb pick she used in the film, and she pulls it out of her purse to show me during our interview. Sometimes when the whole experience of making A Complete Unknown feels too surreal, she puts the pick on again, just to remind herself of this unbelievable journey. “It became this totem of inception just to prove to myself that it really happened,” she says. “I just love it. The only way I could be closer to it is if it were a tattoo.”

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