🎧 Don't Ask Monica Barbaro to Sing Karaoke

The 'Complete Unknown' star warbles as Joan Baez on screen but tells me why she's loath to do it on stage. Plus: diving into Oscar's shorts contenders

SAINT JOAN “Being famous didn't really align with her values,” Monica Barbaro says of playing Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown. “She was leaning more towards her activism.” (Michael Kovac/Getty Images for FIJI Water)

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She may have earned an Oscar nomination for playing Joan Baez — and blown away audiences with how well she captures the folk icon’s golden voice — but Monica Barbaro is still not going to sing for you.

“I’m not a fan of karaoke,” the star of A Complete Unknown told me recently on a call from New York. “I was thrown into a situation recently where karaoke was forced upon me, and I was literally onstage and I just refused to sing.”

SONGBIRD Barbaro as Baez, on stage with Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown. (Searchlight Pictures)

It feels impossible to believe Barbaro is not a natural singer when you see her in James Mangold’s film, but the 35-year-old Bay Area native originally trained as a dancer before transitioning to acting in her twenties, scoring roles on shows like NBC’s Chicago Justice and Netflix’s The Good Cop. Her big-screen breakthrough in 2022’s smash hit Top Gun: Maverick was preceded by many years on the grueling audition circuit — a process she says prepared her, in some ways, for the promotional tour around A Complete Unknown.

Barbaro, who auditioned for the film more than five years ago and booked the role in 2023, met Baez in person for the first time only recently — “Absolutely surreal,” she wrote on Instagram. But she’s now indelibly connected to the singer, even if some people in Barbaro’s life are still getting used to the idea. “Literally, one of my friends was like, ‘Bitch, you can sing?!’”

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Hear my full conversation with supporting actress nominee Barbaro on this week’s Prestige Junkie podcast, which also includes a deep dive on this year’s Oscar-nominated shorts with This Had Oscar Buzz co-host Chris Feil. Getting the shorts right can often be the key to winning your Oscar pool, which makes now the perfect time to sign up for the first-ever Prestige Junkie Oscar pool, where you’ll compete against Ankler staff and your fellow awards obsessives. See you there!

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