“I was blown away by how empowering it feels to create music” – Monica Barbaro on portraying Joan Baez – HERO

Ella Joyce: Your performance in this film is incredible. How did the project first enter your life?
Monica Barbaro: Thank you! It was March 2020 when I first received an email about this project and I was immediately interested. I was a big fan of James Mangold and Timothée Chalamet, and I knew Joan’s music. I didn’t think I could necessarily sing like her, but I felt like I could take a stab at who she was. I grew up with that kind of music in my grade school, I knew these Woody Guthrie songs and I got the gist. I studied a lot of her interviews, went in, auditioned, and they said, “Great. We want you to meet Jim (James Mangold) sometime next week.” And then, as everyone knows, the (Covid-19 pandemic) completely turned the world upside down. I didn’t meet with Jim until 2023 and that’s when he gave me the role and I got to work. (laughs) I kept listening to her music throughout that time and it was like this north star of a project that I wanted to do so badly. I wanted to start playing the guitar, but to protect my own feelings I thought, “If this doesn’t go my way, I’ll be devastated…”

EJ: Self-preservation kicked in… (both laugh)
MB: So when I got it I was like, “I wish I had learned guitar, why did I do this to myself?!” I’m also going to give Jim a hard time because he likes to say, “It’s always been you. As soon as I saw your audition, it was you.” And I’m like, “WellYou could have told me that!” (laughs)

EJ: You got into studying Joan’s interviews, what was the rest of the preparation process like for the role?
MB: I was combing through all of that evidence. She wrote a lot about herself and she is really honest. She holds no punches even when just talking about herself and her intentions, she has a sense of humor about herself and all these things made her a very approachable person to understand. Also, the music preparation, not having been a singer or guitarist, diving head first into it was a way to connect to the journey she went on at fourteen. We had a short phone conversation at one point and she told me she would fall asleep with her guitar in her bed and then wake up and play the next day. I thought, “Oh my God, I did that too!” That kind of thing naturally connects you to a character, so it’s not quite so cerebral, it’s about letting it go when you get there. I advocated certain things about her in the script where I said, “She wasn’t drinking at the time,” or, “She believed this, not that. People assumed she believed that, but what she said , was really this. Jim always told us that we don’t play biographies, at the end of the day, he wants to see real people in real life and not be too intoxicated thinking about them conceptually or being too perfectionistic about them. I read an interview that Joan did, where she talks about her illustrations, and she talks about consciously steering away from perfection, because if you try to seek perfection, you rob the art of what makes it alive and breathing and creatively special. So I thought, “Oh, I think it’s a bit of a license that this is an interpretation of her, and not so much an attempt at a copy.”