Growing up in Mill Valley, Monica Barbaro played piano, flute, violin, guitar and ukulele. But not for very long — and not particularly well. “I started piano five times and tried to teach myself some guitar and some ukulele,” says Barbaro, who plays Joan Baez in “A Complete Unknown.” “I always wanted to play cello, but in school, when I said that, my friend laughed at me, and she was doing violin so, like the lame little kid I was, I took violin. And I hated it, the sound of those high-pitched notes right up in my ear.”
In other words, Barbaro was essentially starting from scratch when it came to playing a professional musician on screen.
She’s not alone. Ryan Destiny had “zero” boxing experience before playing two-time Olympic champion Claressa Shields in “The Fire Inside.” In fact, while Destiny is an actor, a singer and a dancer, one thing she is not is an athlete. “I tried every sport as a kid because my parents were into making me try things, but I failed,” she says, adding that the only two she stuck with “longer than a week” were volleyball and cheerleading. “I was just bad at everything.”
Actors have often learned new skills to inhabit the characters they’re playing: Paul Newman picked up pool for “The Hustler” and Tom Cruise learned to fly a helicopter for “Mission: Impossible”; Margot Robbie took up figure skating for “I, Tonya,” while Keanu Reeves learned to surf in “Point Break” and Natalie Portman studied ballet for “Black Swan.” Daniel Day-Lewis and Jennifer Lawrence each learned to skin animals (for “Last of the Mohicans” and “Winter’s Bone,” respectively).
And this year is no exception. Beyond Barbaro and Destiny, André Holland studying painting for “Exhibiting Forgiveness” and Angelina Jolie spending seven months perfecting opera singing for “Maria” (her vocals were blended with Maria Callas’). Mikey Madison learned dance moves and Russian for her star turn in “Anora,” while Margaret Qualley also studied dance for her role in “The Substance.” Anya Taylor-Joy had never driven before climbing behind the wheel in “Furiosa,” and she still doesn’t have a driver’s license.
Barbaro says learning to play guitar and sing like Baez was daunting, but also helpful. “The music provided an anchor because I could just put any of my nerves into hours and hours of practice and research,” she says, adding that becoming comfortable on the instrument helped her to physically inhabit the role. “When you learn to play, you just hold the guitar differently. You can tell when someone’s just never held an instrument. There’s a different kind of ownership relationship with it when you’ve spent those hours, when you’ve tuned a guitar multiple times and it becomes just a part of your body.”
To get to that level, Barbaro took fundamentals of guitar lessons early on with a teacher named Cal Henry while another guitarist, Adam Tressler, taught her to play Baez’s songs. When the actors’ strike hit last year, she had to stop and work on her own, but she returned to lessons with Tressler after an agreement was reached and “doubled down.”
“Every day was multiple hours doing my own training and it took a lot of self-determination,” she says, trying to learn in months what Baez had spent years developing. And she wasn’t perfect. “Adam could always tell when I hadn’t done as much in the time between our classes, but he was very nice about it.”
Barbaro still considers herself a “novice” but says she can pick up songs more quickly now; she even dreams of going electric and confesses, “I’ve started writing some songs very secretly. I can’t even believe I’m really telling you this. I guess I don’t have to show them to anyone, so it’s not that embarrassing, and it’s nice to explore as a private creative endeavor.”
Trying to sing like Baez was “scarier” than playing guitar on screen, Barbaro says, especially since she got to meet with the legendary singer. “I felt much more vulnerable, especially since Joan Baez was known for her very specific sound.”
Training with vocal coach Eric Vetro, who had worked with (among others) Austin Butler on “Elvis” and Timothée Chalamet for “Wonka,” she went from being unable to sing in the same key as Baez to finding that range. “By the end it was quite comfortable, which was amazing,” she says, adding that Vetro emphasized that confidence mattered almost as much as technique. “Holding back vocally is not of any use.”
Ultimately, the guitar and vocal training also helped her inhabit Baez as a character, Barbaro says. “She felt less elusive.”
Barbaro, who has a serious dance background, says she’d love to find a role where she can utilize that training.
Destiny says that while she doesn’t have traditional technical dance skills, her own dancing background helped her feel comfortable in her body as she trained as a boxer and learned the required moves. But there were still plenty of challenges in the gym, in the ring and even at the dining room table.
Destiny trained twice, once before and once after the pandemic; the first time she learned boxing fundamentals, but the second time around she also devoted herself to “intense” weight training. “Having to gain muscle and gain weight was shocking and new for my body,” she says. “I’m naturally a smaller person, and I don’t eat a lot.”
Perhaps the most difficult, or least fun aspect, was the meal plan the studio provided. “It was bland. I love putting honey or brown sugar in my oatmeal, but I couldn’t. And I had to eat protein pancakes, protein French toast and bread that felt very hard. Also, I really hate protein shakes. But it really helped throughout the training and the filming.”
In the beginning, even shadow boxing for 10 minutes would exhaust Destiny. “It was the most annoying part of training,” she says. Then she’d have to build stamina by doing timed rounds punching her trainer. “I felt like I was dying.”
But the hard work paid off. “On the set, we’d have to do takes over and over, and I was not getting tired. I did my stunts with actual boxers, and it was crazy to see I could keep up with them.”
Destiny went beyond getting strong and learning to box, studying hours of Shields’ fights on tape. “Claressa has a specific style of boxing and moves differently than textbook boxers, and I wanted to make sure I had that ingrained in my body so I could look as authentic as possible,” she says.
Everything also changed when she went from the gym to the set. She had to learn how to throw those same punches in ways that would best suit what the camera needed. “Sometimes I had to throw it wider than a boxer would to get the shot,” she says.
And working with boxers instead of stunt people was another learning experience. “We all had to learn to distance ourselves and make sure we didn’t connect with actual punches,” she recalls. “But that didn’t work every time, and I did get hit. I had never been in a fight before at all so it was nuts to me that I could take a hit and just keep going. That was a really
cool experience.”