As she was preparing to play Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown, Monica Barbaro obsessed over every detail of the folk singer’s life.
“I had pored over her music and we were starting to film already when I started having dreams about her — specifically meeting her,” Barbaro told Yahoo Entertainment. “We always had a really good time! I would wake up in a good mood. I think my subconscious was trying to tell me that it would be OK.”
Barbaro is nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the Oscars for her role in the film, which charts the rise of Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) and his refusal to compromise, which greatly affected the course of American music. At the time, Dylan had a romantic entanglement with Baez that shadowed their professional relationship.
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Barbaro said that Edward Norton, a fellow Oscar nominee who plays musician and early Dylan mentor Pete Seeger, had spoken to Baez before and said she was “really generous with information.”
Timothée Chalamet and Monica Barbaro in A Complete Unknown. (Searchlight Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection)
Still, Barbaro was nervous about bothering Baez and “intimidated by filling her shoes.”
“I wasn’t sure that I could even necessarily bring to conversation to her what it was I needed to ask, but I felt — because of the deep dive that I had done into her personality — I felt like if she was having dreams about someone, she would just reach out,” Barbaro said.
She read in one of Baez’s memoirs about how she simply walked up to Odetta, a folk-blues singer, and sang one of her songs. They became fast friends after that. That gave Barbaro the courage she needed to reach out.
“I was like, ‘I think I can talk to this woman,’ so I snuck around and got my reps to get me her number,” she said.
They had a conversation that was “brief, but it was a beautiful one.” Barbaro was most emotional about hearing the voice she had been studying so carefully.
“It really hit me when she first said hello. I felt like I crossed some kind of threshold after speaking to her. It felt like it was the right thing to do,” Barbaro said. “She said she had been hoping I would reach out.”
A Complete Unknown is bursting with music. To master Baez’s singing voice, Barbaro said she didn’t know how to sing or play guitar until she booked the role — but when she was cast, she “doubled down on all of that.” She worked with vocal coach Eric Vetro, who has worked with stars like Ariana Grande and Angelina Jolie on movie roles, and did “tons of training.”
Barbaro and Chalamet sing a duet in A Complete Unknown. (Searchlight Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection)
“I obsessed over her voice and the vocal qualities that she’s known for, like her vibrato and pitch,” Barbaro said. “At the time this movie takes place, it was quite high — higher than I could go!”
She said the hardest part about the training was learning how to play guitar and sing at the same time, but that’s a challenge that everyone in the main musical cast had to take on, including Norton, Chalamet and Boyd Holbrook (Johnny Cash).
“It was really cool to get together and be in admiration of each other and get to collaborate,” Barbaro said of her castmates.
A Complete Unknown is now available on video on demand.
