Monica Barbaro – who stars as Joan Baez alongside Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown – has opened up about her acoustic guitar experiences while playing the folk hero in the hugely popular biopic.
Directed by James Mangold, the film follows Chalamet as he charts Dylan’s rise from aspiring singer-songwriter to world-conquering folk hero, leading right up to the point he sent shockwaves through the folk community by “going electric” at the Newport Folk Festival.
Along the way, he encounters a handful of influential figures from Dylan’s life and the wider music community – who are similarly played by a stacked cast of big-name actors – from Edward Norton’s Pete Seeger, Boyd Holbrook’s Johnny Cash and Scoot McNairy’s Woody Guthrie.
The film also stars Barbaro as fellow folk legend Joan Baez, who was one of the first major players to record Dylan’s songs in the early 1960s.
Speaking to the New Yorker, Barbaro discusses her performance of Baez, and reveals that Norton had tried to steal – and encouraged her to take for herself – the vintage Martin guitar she had played in the movie.
“Ed Norton kept stealing it from me,” Barbaro says of the artist-accurate 1929 Martin 0-45 that can be seen onscreen. “He was telling me stories about how to keep props. I was, like, ‘Ed, I’m not stealing this guitar!’”
During her time filming, and since she refused to steal her on-screen six-string, Barbaro instead visited a vintage guitar shop in search of a Martin of her own that could help develop her burgeoning guitar chops.
However, just as Dylan did at the infamous Newport Folk Festival, she now wants to break the golden rule of folk music and pivot away from the acoustic: “I shouldn’t admit this publicly, but I really want to get an electric guitar,” she told the New Yorker.
“I’ve been carrying these finger picks that I used for the movie in my pocket ever since we filmed. It’s like a totem to prove that it happened.”
It’s not the first time a Martin acoustic has been a talking point in a Hollywood film.
By now, you’re probably familiar with the famed Hateful Eight Martin scandal, which saw Kurt Russell destroy a priceless acoustic loaned from the company’s museum without realizing he wasn’t in fact holding the prop replacement.
Gibson acoustics also make up a large part of A Complete Unknown, too. For the film, Gibson gave Chalamet a collection of pristine, handcrafted guitars.
