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.
“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.
