Dance is a negotiation of trust with your body; it requires you to twist, flaunt, shrink, extend, fling yourself in the air, hurl yourself to the ground and emote with every fibre of your being. It is simultaneously the most natural and the most unnatural thing to do, and if there’s one thing it teaches, it is dedication. Once acquired, musicality has a way of quietly embedding itself inside the bones, but fluidity and flexibility rust as you stop applying yourself.

For Monica Barbaro, dance has been a lifelong commitment, introduced to her by her mother from an early age. In her late teens, Barbaro advanced the pursuit, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Dance from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts as a classically trained ballerina, studying modern dance, salsa, flamenco and West African dance during her time there.

Dedication is a hard-won virtue, and it has revealed itself in the way Babaro has approached her acting roles. For her breakout role as the tactical fighter pilot Phoenix in Top Gun: Maverick (2022), she learnt to fly aircrafts by undergoing 3 months of intense aviation training, including Navy water survival and ejection training. To portray the legendary folk singer Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown (2024), Barbaro committed to learning the guitar for a year, mastering Baez’s fingerpicking and nailing her powerful voice. The former film was nominated for Best Picture, while Barbaro earned her first Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress with the latter. Not only is she dedicated, but she performs with flying colours. 

At the beginning of the year, Barbaro took her talents to theatre for the first time, performing nearly every day for 11 weeks as Madame de Tourvel in Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the National Theatre’s Lyttelton Theatre in London. Her rom-com with Callum Turner, One Night Only, hits theatres in August, and she begins shooting the Ocean’s prequel alongside a star-studded cast and crew in the same month. Next year will see Barbaro starring in Luca Guadagnino’s timely comedy-drama Artificial, which chronicles the dramatic 2023 ouster at OpenAI. Barbaro takes on the role of OpenAI’s ex-Chief Technology Officer, Mira Murati, sharing the screen with Andrew Garfield, who plays OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman.

As her career soars, Barbaro continues to choose what compels her outside of her comfort zone. Whether it be trusting her body through G-forces strapped into a fighter jet, trusting her fingers to find the strings, or trusting her heart’s capacity to pull wide for a packed house night after night, she chooses to trust herself and embraces the fear that comes with it. It is just as dancers know clearly from pushing the limits of their bodies: growth doesn’t arise from following comfortable routines, but from braving the uncharted leap.     

I’d love to hear how dance has been part of your life since your childhood, and how you think it has shaped you as a person.

Initially, ballet for me was rigorous training. I felt very lucky that in college, I had a lot of dance teachers who encouraged a deeper mind-body connection and included relaxation of the body and muscles as a regular practice, which actually enhanced my dancing far more than pushing myself to the brink. Dance was my foundation and in many various ways formed a lot of how I think and look at the world, but right now that’s the lesson I’m trying to embrace the most. 

What was the transition from dancing professionally to acting professionally like?

I barely danced professionally. I knew immediately when I got out of school that I wanted to act, so I took steady non-performing side jobs to keep myself afloat and pay for acting classes. It was very exciting when I had to let those jobs go because I was starting to book too much work to be available for shifts. 

Why did you decide to pursue theatre? Having performed almost every day for 11 weeks, how do you think your preparation or creative process will change for future projects? Has your brain chemistry been altered in any way?

I’ve always wanted to do theatre. I was obsessed with seeing as many shows as I could afford when I was finishing up at NYU, and that was my dream. Especially to get to do theatre in London just felt like the ultimate goal. I’ve learned so much observing Lesley Manville and being directed by Marianne Elliot. They’re such talented theatre titans and were so supportive of me, despite my lack of experience doing theatre. I think my ballet training came in handy when it came to stamina and understanding what it takes to use your instrument to its capacity without breaks.

The role of Madame de Tourvel demanded that you expose a deep vulnerability to the audience and to your scene partners in an unprecedented way during your acting career. How did it feel the first time, and how has it impacted you?

I think I broke through some emotional blockages thanks to Tourvel, and was able to let go of some fear of failure or shame around putting myself out there and revealing parts of myself to a packed house night after night. 

Tell me about what drew you to your character in the new film One Night Only.

Allie is so much fun, and this movie was presented to me as an opportunity that would shoot between Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial and starting Les Liaisons Dangereuses. It felt like the exact right antidote to the intensity of those two projects. Of course it still meant a lot of hard work and some crazy circumstances, but at the end of the day, we were all trying to make each other laugh on set, and that was a nice release. I also felt like her fears about putting herself out there were very real to me, and this whole film felt like an exercise in embracing and then releasing that part of myself. Also, Will was taking such an exciting approach to this movie to create its propulsive, chaotic energy, so I was excited to get to work with him.