By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | January 23, 2025 |
Of all the major Oscar nominees in the acting categories, one of the least recognizable names was Monica Barbaro, who landed her first Oscar nomination. It wasn’t just that, either: unlike another newcomer, Anora’s brilliant Mikey Madison, Barbaro hadn’t been a fixture on this year’s awards circuit. She was nominated by a few critics’ organizations and the Screen Actors Guild but missed out on other major critics’ groups—the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the National Board of Review, the National Society of Film Critics, and the New York Film Critics Circle. Her Oscar nomination was a hugely pleasant surprise.
Barbaro is terrific in A Complete Unknown, playing Joan Baez opposite Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan. It’s not just that she has a phenomenal singing voice; she nails the role in such a way that she looks exactly like herself yet feels weirdly unrecognizable. I’ve seen her in a number of projects, knew her from those projects, and still had no idea who was playing Baez until I looked it up after the film. That’s a compliment—she’s the kind of actress who completely immerses herself in the context of her project. She looks, as they say, like a lead actress, but she has character actress talent.
I still can’t quite place my finger on why she feels so distinct in this role compared to her other work, but I think it’s in the way she carries herself and perhaps something in how she purses her lips. She’s terrific, and this scene is magnificent:
It should have been easier to recognize her, given her major role just a few years ago in one of the decade’s biggest films, Top Gun: Maverick. She’s great in it too and has that Rebecca Ferguson ability to outperform her male counterparts without dimming their star wattage.
The former ballet dancer (she studied at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts) also played the daughter—and second lead—of Arnold Schwarzenegger in his popular Netflix series FUBAR.
Many of us, however, first knew her from her role in UnREAL, a drama based on The Bachelor, where she, uh, shit her dress.
Older viewers might know her best from her stints on Chicago Justice and Chicago P.D., but I also remember her fondly from Splitting Up Together, where she played the much younger girlfriend of Oliver Hudson’s character with the ridiculous character name of Lisa Apple, though she managed to transcend the usual younger-girlfriend stereotypes.
She’s my favorite kind of success story: no family in the industry, she paid her dues, stood out in a number of roles, and isn’t the type of actress who dominates press tours. Despite over a decade of steady work, she still feels like she came out of nowhere to land an Oscar nomination. I hope that once she wraps FUBAR, she enjoys a steady career à la Rebecca Ferguson or Emily Blunt, excelling equally in action, comedy, and drama.