Monica Barbaro officially became a rising star in Hollywood when she was in the ensemble of one of the best action movies in recent years, Top Gun: Maverick. Barbaro recently followed up that high-profile role with another one by portraying Joan Baez next to Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown. The actress recently contrasted her two biggest movie roles to date, and I’m so shocked about which one she found more “terrifying.”
Barbaro is absolutely excellent as Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown. While Timothée Chalamet deserves his flowers for his rendition of Bob Dylan, the actress absolutely shines as the folk legend and deserves more recognition than she’s receiving this award season. While talking about taking on the role to NME, she said this about the movie:
Having to sing and play guitar live was more terrifying to me than anything I did in Top Gun. [Laughs] Yes, my life was more at risk in Top Gun, but it feels so vulnerable to sing in front of people. My respect for musicians was already through the roof, but now it’s even higher.
Whoa, apparently preparing for a music biopic is harder than Tom Cruise’s Top Gun bootcamp? How is this possible? When the Top Gun: Maverick press tour was underway in 2022, the cast could not stop talking about how intense the process was to be part of the legacy sequel.
The group of actors including Miles Teller, Glen Powell, Lewis Pullman, Jay Ellis, Danny Ramirez, Greg Tarzan Davis and Manny Jacinto underwent three months of flight training designed by Cruise to get them in the back seat of real F/A-18Fs. This included training that had them learning how to tolerate high G-forces. According to the movie’s aerial coordinator, Barbaro particularly had a “really good” tolerance and “impressed everybody.”
While it sounds like Maverick really tested Barbaro’s physical abilities and put her life on the line as far as being in some real Navy jets, she was actually more intimidated by the feat of bringing justice to Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown. As the actress has spoken to before, Tom Cruise actually vouched for her to director James Mangold, and he recently went above and beyond to support the release of the movie. But at the end of the day, she had to learn how to sing and play the guitar live just like the folk singer, and she ultimately found that more difficult.
Between these two films, Monica Barbaro has shown she’ll challenge herself for a role, and the results have been incredible both times. However, if you gave me the choice between learning to rock out like a famous musician or Tom Cruise boot camp, I would choose the former. To each their own! She did both excellently.
