After playing Joan Baez in Dylan movie, Monica Barbaro is no longer 'A Complete Unknown'

Talk about casting whiplash. Is there a bigger one than going from playing a pilot in the U.S. Navy's Top Gun program to portraying the nation's foremost folk singer and civil rights champion?

For actress Monica Barbaro, those disparate performances ? staring down Tom Cruise as Phoenix in 2022's "Top Gun: Maverick" and dueting as Joan Baez with Timothée Chalamet in the new Bob Dylan biopic "A Complete Unknown" (in theaters now) ? promise to summon stardom.

"It's a bit overwhelming," says Barbaro, 35, flashing a big smile. "I'm looking forward to coming home for the holidays."

Barbaro grew up in a small town just north of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, standing out in her public-school drama performances before heading off to study acting and dance at New York University. She quickly found steady work, landing roles in NBC's legal drama "Chicago Justice" and opposite Josh Groban and Tony Danza in the Netflix comedy series "The Good Cop."

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Then came Cruise followed by Chalamet, and the challenge of a lifetime: singing and playing guitar in the style of one of the most iconic performers in American music history.

Joan Baez, feisty and spirited at 83, was a huge folk star when she met Bob Dylan on the New York music scene in the early 1960s. She had been on the cover of Time magazine; he was new to the Big Apple.

Both were smitten and formed a close personal bond that lasted several years, until Dylan's soaring celebrity derailed their relationship around 1965. “Dylan broke my heart,” Baez said in "I Am A Noise," a 2023 documentary about her life. “I was just stoned on that talent.”

It took years, but eventually she put that seminal public pairing in perspective. The watershed moment came when she looked at a painting she was doing of the singer as a young man, “and he was that young face with baby fat, we both had baby fat then, and I put on his music and I started to cry," she told USA TODAY. “All that resentment completely washed away."

Barbaro reached out to Baez as she was preparing for the film. Their conversation was revelatory for many reasons, she says, including shedding light on the nature of their split, which is dramatized in "A Complete Unknown."

"She told me there was a lot of love there, and a lot of disappointment," Barbaro says. "Not just in his walking away from her, but also she just wanted to say something with her music and change the world and speak out about things. At first, he was that protest voice also, and then he didn’t want to do that anymore. She was also in love with his potential. But she did say that she so appreciates what he did do with his talent."

Monica Barbaro took on the role of Joan Baez in 'A Complete Unknown' with no formal voice or guitar skills

Barbaro had never spent much time singing before, which sounds terrifying ? like an actor who has never swum being asked to play Michael Phelps. So she spent a full year with a vocal coach and guitar teacher, taking lessons a few days a week and practicing daily.

"We started with her iconic qualities, that tight vibrato, the high key, that angelic soaring voice, those very identifiable features," she says. "It was hard for me since I didn’t have a relationship with my own singing voice at all. So really, I just aimed at trying to sound like her, even it is impossible to sound like Joan Baez."

Barbaro is seen in "A Complete Unknown" accompanying herself with complex fingerpicking on Baez's trademark Martin six-string. And yet the actress had never played the instrument before.

"I worked on that tons ? really, the music process for this whole movie overhauled my life for a year," she says. "Fingerpicking for me was like learning how to walk in your 30s. It was a lot."

For Monica Barbaro, the key to playing Joan Baez was not playing Joan Baez

Ultimately, Barbaro found a way into her character that loosened the reins on her preparation. Suddenly, she stopped pressuring herself to mimic Baez, and instead encouraged herself to be her own version of the famous performer.

In a recent Baez interview, "she talked about perfectionism robbing art of what makes it interesting. So I borrowed that," Barbaro says. "I needed that for my own work. To be able to let go."

Barbaro seems both relieved and pleased with her experience. She even plans to head to a local movie theater with friends when she's home to see herself in Mangold's biopic.

In the dark, she'll be safe. But after this star turn, she might have a harder time walking out of that theater, no longer a complete unknown.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'A Complete Unknown’ convincingly turns Monica Barbaro into Joan Baez