‘A Complete Unknown’ star Monica Barbaro had dreams about Joan Baez until she called her on the phone
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.
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.”
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.”
“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.
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“She said she had been hoping I would reach out,” Barbaro told Yahoo Entertainment.
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Monica Barbaro’s nuanced approach to the role of folk music icon Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown was key not only to the movie’s story – but also to introducing Baez to a whole new generation of fans.
However, having never been a singer or guitarist, the actor had her work cut out for her. Like her co-star Timothée Chalamet, she had to take a (serious) deep dive into Baez’s playing style – no mean feat considering the veteran artist’s commanding fingerstyle technique.
“I didn’t play guitar at all,” she admits in an interview with the Marin Independent Journal. “Joan’s fingerpicking style is so intricate, so specific, and I had no experience at that.
“I would have a metronome at a snail’s pace to even get two fingers to pluck strings at the same time. A lot of our background artists were musicians and actors in their own right, and, once I could put all those things together, singing in front of those people was a terrifying, intimate, vulnerable experience.
“Not only doing it as Joan but doing it at all. The imposter syndrome was pretty rampant. It was incredibly challenging.”
Barbaro initially had five months to master Baez’s guitar playing before the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike happened, forcing her to continue honing her newly found craft on her own.
“We had to put pencils down, stop, and not train with our coaches,” she tells Cosmopolitan. “But I had the time to continue working on the music alone. To me, it was a bigger emotional challenge to sing, because I feel like it’s very intimate thing to do.
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“But guitar was so challenging because the articulation of my fingers. I had some sense of my voice on my own, but playing guitar is so technical and so that really intimidated me, and the pace I had to play songs early on was just so excruciatingly slow to get the finger picking coordination.
“At the end of the day, what I was most worried about was having Joan’s voice in this feel appropriately representative of her voice.”
In the movie, Barbaro as Baez can be seen playing an artist-accurate 1929 Martin 0-45 – a guitar Edward Norton, who plays Pete Seeger, kept encouraging her to steal from the set.
Despite refusing to do so, the actor recently revealed that she’s hoping to keep up with her guitar chops and even plans to follow in Bob Dylan’s footsteps by going electric.
From his end, Chalamet rocked up to his first few guitar lessons with a cheap $200 Yamaha acoustic, on which he tackled one of Dylan’s trickiest songs.
Janelle is a staff writer at GuitarWorld.com. After a long stint in classical music, Janelle discovered the joys of playing guitar in dingy venues at the age of 13 and has never looked back. Janelle has written extensively about the intersection of music and technology, and how this is shaping the future of the music industry. She also had the pleasure of interviewing Dream Wife, K.Flay, Yīn Yīn, and Black Honey, among others. When she’s not writing, you’ll find her creating layers of delicious audio lasagna with her art-rock/psych-punk band ĠENN.
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A Complete Unknown changes Joan Baez’s career and worldwide success, painting her as an emerging artist at the time she meets Bob Dylan. Director James Mangold’s retelling of Dylan’s early years has been known to change and omit key players around the artist. Though A Complete Unknown’s reviews praise the actress’ lasting performance of the angelic Joan Baez, it’s worth noting that Monica Barbaro’s character isn’t truly representative of the folksinger’s trajectory. Mangold changes both characters’ rise to fame, making it seem like they broke out at the same time.
Notably, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez’s reimagined relationship is crucial to James Mangold’s biopic, as their journeys parallel each other until A Complete Unknown’s ending, where they take different paths. The director’s changes to the barefoot Madonna aren’t fully misguided and successfully add narrative weight to both the singer and her relationship with Dylan. However, as one of the crucial characters in A Complete Unknown, and given Monica Barbaro’s Oscar nomination, it becomes important to clarify the timeline between Joan Baez and Bob Dylan’s careers and how and why Mangold changed it.
One way that A Complete Unknown changes Bob Dylan’s life is by editing Joan Baez’s career when they meet, making them both unsigned artists who are just starting to gain recognition. Though some people in line outside the music venue ask for her autograph, Baez is introduced as another emerging artist who is experiencing her breakout in 1961. In reality, she already had two gold albums by then. However, the change helps create parallels between Dylan and Baez, which adds weight to their on-screen romance, as they’re going through the same experience.
A Complete Unknown received eight nominations at the Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Leading Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Costume Design, and Best Sound.
Shortly after Dylan and Baez meet in A Complete Unknown, both release their first albums, with Joan quickly selling out, which gains her a cover in TIME magazine. In real life, Baez got the cover after her third gold album. However, her early success sets the stage for A Complete Unknown’s reimagining of Dylan and Baez’s relationship and epic collaborations, as their duet performances bring them both to national acclaim. By 1964, both Baez and Dylan become the two key singers of the folk revival movement, having risen to fame simultaneously by helping each other.
Bob Dylan and Joan Baez did meet in 1961 at Gerde’s Folk City, in NYC’s Greenwich Village, just as shown in A Complete Unknown. However, by then, she was a worldwide star, having earned the nickname “barefoot Madonna” for her duet with Bob Gibson at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival, which immediately got her a contract with Vanguard Records. The night they met, Baez didn’t perform but merely wanted to check out Dylan. Her albums Joan Baez, and Joan Baez, Vol. 2, had already achieved gold status, the latter peaking at no. 13 on the Billboard chart.
The final scene of A Complete Unknown foreshadows a tragic event in Bob Dylan’s life that occurred just one year after the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.
While Baez’s breakout happened in 1960, Dylan’s came in mid-1963. Even if A Complete Unknown overlooks Peter, Paul, and Mary’s roles in helping The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’s success, it recognizes Baez was among the most famous artists to cover “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.” However, A Complete Unknown heavily downplays her international fame, implying that Dylan is not far behind. Mangold likely wanted Baez and Dylan to be parallels, so the audience’s emotional involvement in the couple increased. The pair being at the start of their careers makes their love story feel fated, as they’re perfectly aligned.
Sources: Biography, Rolling Stone
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Did you see the movie? It shows Baez on the cover of Time Magazine before she meets Dylan. It shows Albert Grossman trying to lure her away from her record company BEFORE she meets Dylan.
Thank you! I thought I was losing my mind reading this so I actually went back and watched those early scenes over again. Long BEFORE Dylan releases his first album (not the cover album that didn’t sell) he is explaining to Sylvie that he let Baez sing one of his songs because she was on the cover of TIME. She is clearly the bigger star in the movie early on, there’s no debate. Other than the fact Baez didn’t perform the night she met Dylan, I am not sure what this article got right. Total clickbait and we fell for it haha.
Bob Dylan’s extraordinary career over the past 60-plus years has featured countless songs that have shaped the world’s social and political culture.
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