Monica Barbaro was spending a day in the Bay Area with her mother — going to theSan Francisco Museum of Modern Art,attending a dance class atShawl-Anderson Dance Centerin Berkeley and hanging out at theExploratorium— and had so much fun that she slept in the next day, missing several calls from her representatives.
The news: The San Francisco-born actress had nailed her audition to co-star with Tom Cruise in“Top Gun: Maverick.”
“We were both tearing up,” Barbaro recalled in a video chat with The Chronicle just days before the long-awaited film’s debut on Friday, May 27.
“But there was a pipe that had burst in the first floor, so we spent the rest of the day sitting above the water waiting for the plumber,” she added, with a laugh. “It was one of those things where all hell is breaking loose, but you’re just so happy that nothing can faze you.”
Barbaro, who grew up in Mill Valley, spent her childhood studying ballet and going to Giants games with her dad, who had season tickets.
After graduating from Tamalpais High School, she went to New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and earned a degree in dance, but she decided to pivot to acting. She moved back home and began by registering onsfcasting.comand appearing in local commercials and indie and student short films.
Now Barbaro’s career is taking off at supersonic speed. Phoenix, her character in “Top Gun: Maverick,” is one of the budding fighter pilots that Cruise’s character, Maverick, is tasked with training. The sequel to 1986’s “Top Gun” was completed three years ago, but its release was delayed because of the pandemic.
Barbaro, 31, who starred in the Netflix series “The Good Cop,” can also be seen in “I’m Charlie Walker,” with Mike Colter as the trucking and construction entrepreneur who battled racism while cleaning up an oil spill off the coast of San Francisco in 1971. The film, shot in the Bay Area, is slated to open June 10.
Barbaro, who now lives in Los Angeles, spoke to The Chronicle this week via video from Toronto, where she was working on a global spy series with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q:What made you want to be an actress?
A:I grew up dancing at Marin Ballet in San Rafael. My favorite thing about it was getting to perform “The Nutcracker” at the beautiful Frank Lloyd Wright Marin County Civic Center. One year I had to play Clara’s brother, Fritz, and I remember being so upset that that was the part that I got, because I’m not a boy. It wound up being the most fun I’ve ever had because I got to disappear in this character because this character wasn’t me, and I could pull out all of my mischievous energy and meet that with this boyish energy. There was just something in me that lit up and I was like, “Oh I have to chase that.”
Then I went to my middle school and we had to learn “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” to study Shakespeare. It’s a super fun play. I had never worked harder on anything in my life. I knew everyone’s lines in the entire play. … That all happened around the age of 12.
But then I kept dancing because I was really deep within it and really that that was just my world, my friends were there and I was good at it. But when I got a dance degree, I was like, “You’re not getting any younger, you don’t want to find yourself at 70 thinking back and going ‘Man, I wish I had just tried (acting).’ “
Q: You must have had your own image ofTom Cruisebefore you met him. What was it like working with him?
A:I didn’t consider myself to be someone who would be particularly starstruck, so I was surprised that I was nervous around Tom. But he made us all immediately very comfortable.
He had high expectations of us that we had to meet. He also designed a program for all the flight training for this movie so that we would be in the best possible position to meet those expectations. He was a real mentor. It was art imitating life — he mentored us as he does in this film and really, really believed in us.
问:听起来像是训练是激烈,李ke a boot camp.
A:Boot camp is a great word for it. (Laughs.) We trained for a few months leading up to the flying, and then we were flying throughout.(Editor’s note: The actors, other than Cruise, never flew planes for the scenes in the film but were flown in planes by professional pilots.)
We started in a Cessna just learning the ropes of basic aviation. Takeoffs, landings, things like that. Then we moved on to a plane called the Extra EA-300, which is an acrobatic plane, so that we could start to do some more intense maneuvers, things that our characters would be doing in the jet, and also pulling up to eight G’s, which is a wild, physical experience.
Then we got to do some dogfighting over the Pacific Ocean in an Aero L-39 Albatros, which is a jet, and then we moved on to the F/A-18.
We had to pass a swim course in order to be safe to eject over water if that were to happen. It’s like survival skills training — they just drowned us, having to be upside-down blindfolded.
Q: What would you say was the most dangerous stunt that you did?
A:Flying low over water. We also flew low within canyons in the mountains, where trees were above us. That was pretty crazy. But a low flight over water — someone was like, “Oh yeah, you hit a bird, you’re done.”
Q: The world premiere was in San Diego, with Cruise flying in on a helicopter. What was the experience like?
A:It was just really beautiful to get to share it with my family, to get to bring my dad. I had enough tickets to also bring the two pilots who flew me in the movie, and they were super stoked to be there.
I think it’s wonderful that it’s coming out now, when communities can see it in theaters, how it’s meant to be seen.
“Top Gun: Maverick”(PG-13) opens in theaters on Friday, May 27.