Star Turn

The actor grew up just north of San Francisco, among redwoods, hills and plenty of fresh air. The youngest of three, she moved between two households after her parents separated, learning from the “trials and tribulations” of her older siblings. Her mother, a devoted dancer, put all three children into ballet classes – and, for Barbaro, it came naturally: “If there was music on, I was dancing.” She was five or six when she started and then, at the age of 12, something shifted. A school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream – she played Hermia – changed everything. “It felt like I breathed oxygen for the first time,” she says. “Some kids did it and didn’t care. For me, it was completely defining.”

Still, Barbaro kept her dreams of acting secret for years. “Saying you want to act can feel like saying you want attention,” she reflects. “As if it means you’re craving celebrity, but I don’t believe it’s the same thing.” She pauses. “I think I was also very intimidated by it. Dance let me perform without exposing parts of myself in the way acting requires.”

Barbaro enrolled at Tisch, NYU’s School of the Arts, to study dance, edging closer to acting through electives. “Now I’m grateful for the perspective,” she says. “Dance gave me a completely different way into character. People reveal themselves through their body language.”

That physical awareness also shaped the work she gravitated towards. Action roles, with their intensity and discipline, proved a natural fit. When Top Gun: Maverick arrived, the scale of it was both exhilarating and daunting. “There was an immense amount of pressure,” she says. “A lot of people felt you should never sequel Top Gun.” She also felt the responsibility of representing female fighter pilots keenly. “The women I met were extraordinary,” she says. “I wanted to honor their strength and integrity.”

If Top Gun: Maverick introduced Barbaro to a global audience, A Complete Unknown – her Oscar-nominated turn as Joan Baez opposite Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan – cemented her as an undeniable talent. The role didn’t come easy: an initial audition before the pandemic, followed by years of uncertainty, not just about whether she’d got the part, but if the film would even get made. Does she remember where she was when she finally heard the role was hers? “Oh yeah. I was at home in LA and I just collapsed to the floor,” she admits. “I always do [when I get big news], I have to get on the ground. I hid under the table and called my agent.”

The Oscar nomination came while Barbaro was in London for a fitting. Again, she fell to the floor, but this time she had prepared herself. The night before, she had spoken on the phone to someone who had been in a similar position, and the lengthy conversation had allowed her to process exactly what this moment might mean for her. The conclusion she came to was this: “It’s a huge honor but it doesn’t actually give my work more meaning, and I know that to be very true.” Awards, she believes, are complicated terrain for artists. “In some ways, it’s a validation, and it’s shoring up the infrastructure of a career, of course. And it can be really exciting. But to expect it, I think, is to look at your art in the wrong way.”

The press has a tendency to label actors as ‘the next big thing’; a ‘breakthrough talent’; ‘an ingénue’, and so forth. While Barbaro is certainly at a pivotal moment in her career, you can see why she bristles at those labels. “I’ve been called a breakthrough but it took years to get here,” she sighs. “I remember talking to Mikey Madison about it. She was like, ‘I’ve been working for a really long time but everyone’s like, oh, hey, you’re brand new! Umm, no, actually, I’m tired but, yeah, sure: I just got here. I’m fresh as a daisy!’” Barbaro is laughing but you can understand her frustration. She has been working for more than a decade, collecting small, life-altering wins along the way: her first commercial, her first television show, the moment she realized she could actually make a living as an actor. “Those were all huge for me,” she says. “They changed my life, but I understand [the labels’] purpose – they’re a marketing strategy.” Despite how it may read, Barbaro never sounds jaded, simply wise to the realities of her industry.

She recently wrapped One Night Only opposite Callum Turner (“He’s like a Labrador – kind, energetic, fun, collaborative”): a delightfully light experience that felt perfectly timed after a “very heady and intense” period filming Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, about the founders of OpenAI. “I also knew this play was coming up, so getting to do this wild concept rom-com with really delightful people in a city that I love [New York], was exactly the thing I needed and wanted.”

The play is Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the National Theatre, directed by Marianne Elliott, in which she stars alongside Lesley Manville and Aidan Turner. It will be her stage debut – in London, no less – and yes, she’s terrified. “I haven’t done a play before,” she says. “And I’ll be doing a British accent, in Britain, as an American. So… I’m sort of asking for it.” She laughs, before admitting to being something of a perfectionist. “The accent has to be absolutely flawless so that it doesn’t get in the way of the more important thing, which is telling the story. That’s how I felt about music [in A Complete Unknown] and how I felt about pretending to be a pilot. I think it’s grounding in a way because I can obsess over it, which I like to do.”

It isn’t just the accent Barbaro is nervous about; there’s “the entirely unknown territory” of the rehearsal room, the stamina needed for the show’s run, the toxicity and intensity of the source material. She’s also immensely drawn to her character: Madame de Tourvel. With her initially guarded nature and the catastrophic vulnerability that follows, it’s a role that feels quite personally confronting for Barbaro. “I’m a person who’s been romantically quite protective, so I think it’s a very important character for me to look at and live with.”

Indeed, the experience – from reading the script to auditioning and visiting London’s National Theatre for the first time – has been formative, even before rehearsals have begun. “I feel like a kid discovering acting again,” she says. “That’s how I know it’s right.” In fact, she says, it’s become the benchmark against which she measures every other project: “I’ve started to operate more intuitively [with my choices], I think, than I had given myself the luxury of doing before.”

The PORTER photo shoot takes place the day after our interview and, true to her word, Barbaro arrives in jeans, a sweatshirt and loafers, her hair still wet beneath a National Theatre-branded cap (“an excellent Christmas gift”). Throughout our conversation, she returns to perfectionism – a hangover from ballet, she suggests – and her effort to let it serve the work rather than suffocate it. That balance is harder to strike off-screen: the red carpets, dressing up and, perhaps, the part we’re here to do today. “It’s fun in a way but it’s also very stressful to be photographed and be observed in that way. It’s this pretend identity thing. It’s supposed to be you, but you’re also dressed in a way that you don’t dress in your life ever,” she says of red carpets and events.

In terms of fame, Barbaro considers herself fortunate to be in what she calls a “sweet spot”. She hasn’t experienced the full invasion of privacy that often accompanies celebrity, and is still able to leave the house largely unbothered. “People know me professionally,” she says, “but I can go out and not really be hassled, which I’m very grateful for. Although, if I’m with a friend who is more recognizable, it’s less so…” More often, she laughs, people can’t place her: “I’ve had a lot of instances where someone’s like, ‘Have we met?’”

And after a spring spent on stage, what then? Barbaro pauses. “I want to stay hungry,” she says, “but not in a way where I’m always chasing something I can’t quite grasp, telling myself life will be better once I have that thing.” There’s a name for that, I say: arrival fallacy. “Yes!” she cries. “It’s actually a subject of Crime 101. Chris Hemsworth’s character – a thief – has this idea that if he can get to a certain monetary number, then he’ll know he’s safe and he’ll be able to quit. My character gets to question that.”

If Barbaro is living through what many would consider the most exciting chapter of her career so far, she’s determined not to rush past it. “I don’t want to take any of it for granted,” she says. “I want to maintain a sense of wonder.” As the afternoon light shifts across the restaurant and a hush settles over the room, signaling the end of the lunch sitting, she turns to the idea of balance, something she is only just beginning to prioritize. “There are parts of my life that I haven’t been looking at as much,” she says thoughtfully. “I haven’t really been watering my own garden.” If she could give herself one piece of advice, it would be this: “You can’t forget to live your own life in the midst of it all.”

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