Meet Monica Barbaro: the breakout star of Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown

Monica Barbaro has flown fighter jets alongside Tom Cruise and fought baddies for the CIA shoulder to shoulder with Arnie. Now she is duetting with Timothée Chalamet in the new biopic about Bob Dylan.

They may have been supporting roles, but Barbaro never fails to leave a mark, and many will be hailing her short but star-making turn as Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown when it hits UK cinemas this week.

What’s extraordinary about the 34-year-old’s performance is that it’s her, rather than Baez, singing and playing in the film, yet when she was cast she had never done “more than a ditty” on screen and couldn’t play the guitar.

It meant that after landing the role “I was ecstatic and absolutely terrified”, and 10 minutes later she was off to get her sister’s guitar restrung “and started on YouTube that day. I knew I had a mountain to climb.”

After five months, Barbaro was ready. One of her first meetings with Chalamet was at a musical rehearsal, which she was thankful for. “It was magical. Sometimes I was overwhelmed at how incredible it felt to play music and sing, and then to get to do that in harmony with him… I had heard his pre-records and knew he had this incredible Bob cooking, then to do it live…”

As part of the preparation she spoke to the real Baez on the phone. “She was so honest. In her memoir she exposes herself a lot and doesn’t sugarcoat her history… she wasn’t trying to dictate anything about what we were doing,” she says.

Barbaro grew up in San Francisco and started out as a dancer before moving into acting. After a decade of TV work she starred in the film The Cathedral in 2021. A year later she was cast as fighter pilot Natasha “Phoenix” Trace in Top Gun: Maverick. “We did learn how to fly planes, which is pretty wild. My favourite thing about acting is I didn’t have to choose a career, I get to do an infinite amount,” she says.

Then came Netflix show Fubar in which she played Arnold Schwarzenegger’s daughter — where both, unknown to each other, are CIA operatives — and filming overlapped with A Complete Unknown. “That was a little crazy as the characters couldn’t be more opposing. One is very pro-violence and one is very anti. There were jokes about both on each set.”

Next up is heist film Crime 101, with Chris Hemsworth and Barry Keoghan. “I love to pivot completely. I love to change it up where I can.”

A Complete Unknown is in cinemas from Friday