‘A Complete Unknown’ Oscar nominee Monica Barbaro on the scene that ‘terrified’ her and finally meeting Joan Baez
Oscar nominee Monica Barbaro has earned rave reviews for her performance as Joan Baez in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown since the movie first screened for critics and awards pundits in November. However, no review of her performance likely meant more than the one Baez gave herself.
“I loved what she did in the film,” Baez said to the Marin Independent Journal last month. “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.”
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For Barbaro, the praise from Baez made public what the actress had heard from the legendary singer in private. Barbaro had contacted Baez via phone during the production and received a voicemail from the folk singer after she screened the movie. So when Barbaro finally met Baez in person this week at a benefit concert in San Francisco, the pressure of their in-person contact had eased.
“I had dealt with all of my immense emotions, and just my mind being blown — I handled all of that before we met,” Barbaro tells Gold Derby. “So that was good, too, because I was worried I would start crying or falling over. I was nervous about my ability to make eye contact and string a sentence together. So [because of our prior communication] I could do that before I saw her, and then we hugged, and it was just… it was crazy. It felt like there was a familiarity there that I really appreciated.”
A first-time Oscar nominee for her performance in A Complete Unknown, one of the film’s eight overall nominations, Barbaro was previously best known for her appearance in Top Gun: Maverick and the Netflix series FUBAR. (She was simultaneously filming the Arnold Schwarzenegger action-comedy and A Complete Unknown.) However, her performance in the James Mangold film required another level of preparation and study. To play Baez opposite Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan, Barbaro had to learn how to play guitar and sing like Baez, and she spent hours listening to Baez’s voice and working with a vocal coach to replicate Baez’s signature vibrato accurately. But it’s evident from her very first scene that Barbaro’s work paid off. On stage inside a small club, Barbaro, as Baez, sings “House of the Rising Sun,” pausing halfway through to push her microphone away and sing the remainder of the song a capella. Like all the other singing performances in the film from the cast, the performance was done live on set without the support of pre-recorded tracks.
“God, I was most terrified to do that more than anything else in the movie,” Barbaro says. “I focused on that song a lot. We pre-recorded that song very early, so I knew that version was not the one that I was happiest with because the vibrato wasn’t quite there, not nearly to the extent that I got later.”
Barbaro trained as a dancer at New York University and compared the “House of the Rising Sun” performance to the ballet move adagio, where the dancer comes off the bar and stands in the middle of the room while slowly putting their leg in the air. “I explained this to my friends that I danced with, I was like, ‘This song is like doing an adagio at half-speed in a thing I’ve never done before,’” she recalls.
However, when it came time to execute the performance on set, Barbaro says she reverted to what she learned about Baez. “What I learned from Joan is that she’s just this excellent storyteller, and the way she sort of hovers on different words and different lyrics brings the songs she sings to life,” she explains. “So I thought, at best, this can be, in a way, sort of like a monologue, and so to connect with the words in the song, to tell a story is the most important thing.”
Not all of Barbaro’s performance scenes were as intimidating, she says. Barbaro also recreates several live concerts as Baez, including the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when Dylan rather famously “went electric.” Before Dylan plugged in, however, he performed a raucous duet with Baez of “It Ain’t Me, Babe.”
“What’s so funny about that scene is it’s in complete contrast to the ‘House of the Rising Sun’ scene,” she says, noting that while they spent two days on “House of the Rising Sun,” the “It Ain’t Me, Babe” performance was captured in a handful of takes as she had to fly off to finish shooting FUBAR.
“We had become so comfortable performing live, and we had done so many songs at that point. We had already done ‘Girl from the North Country,’ the Pittsburgh concert, and other things. So there was an immediate comfortability there,” she says of her collaboration with Chalamet.
In the scene, as Dylan and Baez sing a song that mirrors their off-stage relationship, Dylan’s on-again, off-again girlfriend Sylvie (played by Elle Fanning) watches from the side. She realizes her relationship with Dylan is over.
“We knew Elle was beautifully anchoring this scene,” Barbaro says. “So, for us, I really trusted him. I think he really trusted me, and we had our own versions of what our characters were thinking. But also, the lyrics do so much there again with the storytelling of the song. It’s fun. It’s a little on the nose at times, and then it’s also funny because of that, and it’s easy to play those lyrics into his face because she’s saying those things to him.”
Barbaro says the scene, her final onscreen singing performance as Baez, was equal parts “beautiful, fun, and crazy.”
“It was really alive in a really special way,” she recalls. “And it’s one of my favorites to watch of the scenes I’m involved in. It feels fun, and it feels free.”
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