Monica Barbaro in Full Bloom

Michelle RuizWed, August 5, 2026 at 12:00 PM UTC

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Dior dressCredit: Amy Harrity

Monica Barbaro isn’t one to brag, so I’ll do it for her: The actress masterminded the sexiest moment in her randy new romantic comedy, One Night Only.

Not because she advocated for an emerald sequinned Alex Perry mini dress with a neckline so plunging, camera shots were framed either above or below her “McGees”—a nod to Anchorman’s “Tits McGee”—Barbaro tells me, trying to keep a straight face. The dress upped the ante in zany action sequences, like when her character, Allie, a frustrated singer belting covers for Big Pharma commercials, goes on a madcap dash for condoms, tangling with scorned pizza maker Owen (Internet boyfriend and real-life Dua Lipa husband, Callum Turner), but that’s not the movie magic I’m talking about, either.

Sportmax top and skirt; Dior bracelet; Bvlgari ringCredit: Amy Harrity

No, it’s all about the claw clip.

One Night Only is set in a dystopian near-future New York in which sex out of wedlock is illegal, save for 12 hours a year when the ban is lifted, inspiring a horny holiday akin to New Year’s Eve on Cialis. No spoilers, but somewhere in this city-wide sexfest, Allie and Owen may end up passionately frenching. Mid-makeout, he just might reach back and unclasp her claw clip, releasing her dark lob and her inhibitions. It’s a move so specific and attentive, it belongs in a cheeky coffee table book about “porn for women” that’s actually just pages of hot guys vacuuming. Even as the host of a podcast about smut, I didn’t know a claw clip could be so subtly, sneakily erotic. Thankfully, Barbaro did.

“A girl would love a guy to do this,” she said while plotting the scene with Turner, director Will Gluck (credited with sparking a “rom-com renaissance” with 2023’s juggernaut Anyone But You) and intimacy coordinator Chelsey Cary. “Trust me.”

Barbaro issues a disclaimer—“not to discredit any of the men on set and what they offered. Let me say that any pushback on any idea was very gentle!”—but she knew the womanly plight of leaning on a headrest or lying on a yoga mat or furtively kissing against a wall while a claw clip pierces your scalp. A man who would notice that discomfort: “That’s the hottest thing in the world,” Barbaro says with the unwavering confidence of the producer she seems destined to one day be. She knew, too, that Allie would be desperate for a late-night costume change to an oversized T-shirt (cue: Owen offering her one at his pizza shop) and that her friend and Top Gun: Maverick co-star Jay Ellis would make a killer cameo (one of many in One Night Only). With Gluck’s blessing, Barbaro texted Ellis and booked him herself.

Gabriela Hearst dress; Pandora jewelry; Ferragamo heelsCredit: Amy Harrity

“I’ve always wanted to share my ideas, but I’ve operated from a place of wanting permission to do so,” Barbaro says. That changed last year after she earned a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for nailing Joan Baez’s folksy warble and divine cool in the Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown. Though Timothée Chalamet is at the film’s center, when he and Barbaro crooned their duet of “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” by some estimations—mine, at least—Barbaro was more mesmerizing.

Now, with the epithet of Oscar nominee attached to her name, “that permission is given,” she says of speaking up on-set. “Whether they’re giving it to me more, or whether I’m in more ownership of it, it’s there.”

After years as a standout supporting player to A-list men—stealing scenes from Tom Cruise, Glen Powell, and Miles Teller in Top Gun: Maverick or Chris Hemsworth in the recent caper, Crime 101—Barbaro is stepping into her first major leading film role with One Night Only. She brings a self-effacing charm reminiscent of Sandra Bullock and the pluck of a 37-year-old, Mexican-and-Italian-American striver (complimentary) who has defied the industry’s attempts to define her. Last I checked, there were no leads quite like Barbaro on rom-com’s majority-blonde Mount Rushmore.

A rising star with a mind to the female perspective, making movies hotter one claw clip at a time? It is Barbaro, babe, that Hollywood’s been looking for.

Stella McCartney dress; Van Cleef & Arpels jewelry; Dior heelsCredit: Amy Harrity

So, no, Barbaro isn’t one to brag, but she has plenty of material: former ballerina; not one, but three major projects on the horizon; oh, and she also happens to be dating thinking woman’s crush, Andrew Garfield. Days before our interview, the pair were photographed together at Wimbledon, sending the internet aflutter.

When Barbaro strides into the café at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City on a Monday morning, she dips right in for the hug, grabs herself a hot tea and, within seconds, we’re cooing at pics of each other’s dogs (she’s missing her little white rescue, Auggie, who’s currently at pup summer camp, hiking among the redwoods with Barbaro’s mom in her native Mill Valley, California). Barbaro wears black Kallmeyer Bermuda shorts, a gauzy grey blouse by the same cool-girl brand unbuttoned to her sternum, and cat-eye sunglasses as a makeshift headband—the kind of breezily chic outfit you’d clock on the street and vow to copy later. With rom-coms on the brain, it must be said: I’ll have what she’s having.

“She is someone who you want to be in the trenches with,” Powell, who calls Barbaro “family” and has brought her to his native Texas for holidays “down at the ranch” with his biological one, shares in an effusive, nearly 10-minute-long voice note. “Somebody that when it’s unbelievably cold at night or you’re in a cockpit at the speed of sound and everybody’s legs have given out and you’re tired and you’re wiping puke off your face—she’s the kind of person that is laughing at the situation rather than complaining about it.” To be clear, the vomit wasn’t Barbaro’s: The only woman in the Top Gun sequelgroup chat is also the only cast member, other than veteran stunter Cruise, who didn’t hurl during grueling G-Force training.

Turning co-stars into kin is a Barbaro specialty. “Monica is the kind of person you meet once and instantly want to be best friends with forever,” Este Haim, who co-scored One Night Only and makes a spiky cameo, tells me in an email. “She’s so fucking funny and doesn’t take anything too seriously, other than her craft.” The eldest Haim sister cheered on Barbaro during Allie’s singing scenes—“she has so much range and emotion”—but their friendship was truly forged while “sitting in the hair and makeup chairs…bonding over the universal experience of trying to look like functioning adults while secretly feeling like two kids who wandered onto a movie set.”

Fendi dress; De Beers jewelryCredit: Amy Harrity

Gluck wooed Barbaro to the project with his adventurous riff on the rom-com genre. In their first meeting, the director compared One Night Only to Uncut Gems, After Hours,and Midnight Run, all frenetic ticking-clock movies, nary a single rom-com. “Interesting,” Barbaro replied, reenacting her response with actorly flair: “My brain was in Nora Ephron. You want me to go to Scorsese. Got it!” Then there’s what Barbaro calls the flick’s“absurd premise,” though she notes the idea of policing the public’s reproductive health “isn’t as [unrealistic] as it should be.” The more notable part is that, in the film’s alt-universe, men’s bodies are also subject to government control. “We’re all in a state where we’re like, ‘What is the rule of law right now and where is it going?’” Barbaro asserts—so why shouldn’t a sexy romp also come with social commentary? “It’s not that the rom-com audience is a bunch of idiots,” she says, and I just about cheer. “You can be a hopeless romantic and be very intelligent.”

That’s true of Barbaro’s Allie, who rebels against One Night Only’s high-stakes carnality, preferring the dying art of a real connection. Is Barbaro a romantic, or a cynic, herself? “I’m a little bit of both. I feel like if you’re hard-up avoidant about love, it’s because, deep-down, you’re actually super romantic and you’re just afraid of getting hurt,” she says, slowly, pensively, as if she’s still working it all out in real time. “I dip my toe in all ideologies around romance, but mostly I’m a romantic. I’m also kind of a workaholic, so I’ve never given my life over to it, which, as a woman, I’m quite proud of. But there’s also the other side of that coin, which is: You can get to a point in your life where you wake up and you look around and you’re sort of like, Oh, have I been self-protecting by [adopting] so much autonomy and independence?” Barbaro adds: “I’m definitely shifting some of that perspective now.”

Dries Van Noten jacket and skirt; Dior earrings; Tom Ford heelsCredit: Amy Harrity

In her twenties, Barbaro prioritized her career, approaching it with a dancer’s discipline. She’d trained in ballet since age 5, which makes the wild body standards and ageism of Hollywood seem cute by comparison—“like, relaxed,” Barbaro confirms (if you’re not tapped by a professional company at 16, she notes, you’re toast). Majoring in dance at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, she burnt out and pivoted to acting. (Let the record show Barbaro has maintained the upright posture and grace of a ballerina and, per Powell, is “always the first one on the dancefloor.”) Though that still felt daunting, as a relative latecomer. “I turned 21 right after I graduated and was like, ‘I’m old,’” Barbaro remembers with a wry laugh. She had no connections and no resumé but she did have a clear-eyed perspective that would come to serve her well: Breakout stardom is a myth. “Even if someone seems like an overnight success, you’re like, ‘oh, but you were also in a sitcom when you were 12.’”

Ironically, more than a decade later, Barbaro won a breakthrough performance award for her portrayal of Baez, but she doesn’t like to gloss over how long and winding her ascent has been. She triumphed over as many as 100 hopefuls to land the role of “Phoenix” in Top Gun: Maverick, an unruffled fighter pilot who, in a radical twist, was no one’s love interest. “Every actress in Hollywood was up for the role,” Powell recalls, noting he first met Barbaro in the production office before she was even cast, “and Monica really beat out some of the biggest, most exciting names.” No easy feat in an industry that revels in hot lists and power rankings. “Monica really rose to the challenge. It’s always nice when you watch somebody just win a role fair and square.”

Still, in the uncertainty of the pandemic, the blockbuster sequel that, per Steven Spielberg, “saved Hollywood’s ass” was delayed seven times. Barbaro did TV work in the interim.

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“It’s so funny because I’ve had nonstop breakthroughs,” she says, “and also hiatuses and fears.”

Stella McCartney dress; Van Cleef & Arpels jewelry; Dior heelsCredit: Amy Harrity

Only Barbaro’s hands appeared in her first commercial, for Square, the then-new mobile card reader, circa 2011. She got a free manicure and, much to her delight, a SAG card, but in her early career, Barbaro also found herself in vulnerable positions. “One of the very first things I did was a project that I lost the job because I wouldn’t be topless in it,” she tells me. This was around 2010, when Anne Hathaway famously bared her body in Love & Other Drugs, while still managing to “maintain her integrity,” Barbaro says. At the time, Barbaro thought: “I have none of the power that she has to do that.” As a featured extra with no lines, she had no context or assurance on how her breasts might be used. She later got the job back, with permission to keep her shirt on. Then another project called for full nudity.

“I don’t think I want to negotiate my body for the rest of my life,” Barbaro thought. “Maybe [acting] isn’t for me.”

Her stories are likely all-too-common for upcoming actresses, especially pre-#MeToo —“it was a different rule set,” Barbaro says—but they feel no less disturbing to hear today: more evidence of women hypersexualized. Even now, “I’ve not gotten naked in anything I’ve done because I haven’t worked on something where that would be a necessity to the story.”

As open as she was to that McGees-revealing dress, Barbaro’s intimate scenes in One Night Only were preplanned via a nudity rider she calls “absolutely necessary.” For example: “You could say you would show side boob, but no nipple.” Feeling respected by Gluck and Turner made her sexiest scenes more comfortable. Turner is “an absolute gentleman,” and “much more than just a handsome face,” Barbaro says, adding that their shared nervousness around some of the wacky—and likely embarrassing—comedy sequences led to an easy trust between the two. “His heart comes through when he’s acting… He really pays attention. You would think every actor has to be like that, but many don’t.”

Balmain jacket and skirt; Carolina Herrera earringsCredit: Amy Harrity

The pair bonded over a shared love of their dogs, hot toddies, London’s Hampstead Heath, and trying to out-ridiculous each other with their pitches to Gluck on set. “Monica brought a sharpness. A detail to her Allie,” Turner says. “She’s such a wonderfully committed actor who can turn it on at any given moment, but also always knows how to have fun.” Turner likens himself and Barbaro to “two adventurers following our guide. Will created the playground for us to let go and jump every time. And the space was safe for both of us.”

As an actress of mixed ethnicity, Barbaro has not always been seen as clearly as she was by Turner and Gluck. At times, Hollywood’s struggle to cast her only highlighted that she was not quite sure how to cast herself. “I’ve always been completely honest about my ethnic background,” Barbaro says. Her mom is of Mexican, English, and German descent; her dad is Italian-American. Still, there were questions in the casting process about her “percentages.” Barbaro was often asked how she identifies, a question with no easy answer. “Thank you for the existential crisis I now spiral into,” she cracks.

She played Latina detectives and prosecutors on a string of 2010s police procedurals, but resisted repeated attempts to manipulate her image. “I’ve been encouraged to play into my Latina heritage in a way that is inauthentic, and I’ve rejected that idea many, many times.” Yet: “in that neutralizing of myself to not offend anybody, part of me is like, Where is the part of my Mexican heritage that I really want to embrace?” Shooting the 2023 Paramount+ rom-com At Midnight in Mexico City, Barbaro felt deeply connected to the country and the crew.

Acceptance has been a moving target. She’s been called racial slurs by kids on the playground in her youth—and regarded as not “enough to count” by others. On one project she declines to name, Barbaro was “put through the wringer” before being deemed—she hesitates to say it—“ethnic enough for the role.” When her character’s parents were later cast as “meat-and-potatoes white folk,” Barbaro sobbed. “Not only did I have to prove myself to you in some capacity,” she says, still tender at the memory, “but now you’re robbing me of what I do have, which is a mixed identity.”

This is where Barbaro lands: in the in-between. “I don’t belong in either”—as in either side of her parentage—“but I do belong in this mixed territory.” By the time she was playing Arnold Schwarzenegger’s daughter in the 2023 Netflix drama series, Fubar, Barbaro advocated for the actress playing her mom to represent her mixed heritage (the role went to Argentine-Italian actress Fabiana Udenio). Barbaro speaks with the calm of someone who is no longer keen to explain herself, saying her identity is less a part of the conversation now, although she is aware of the blowback to her casting as Baez, with some critics and commenters alleging that she appeared whiter than the half-Mexican, half-Scottish singer.

“And then I just played an Albanian woman!” Barbaro lightens the mood with punchy comedic timing. In director Luca Guadagnino’s forthcoming biopic Artificial, about the scandalous firing and rehiring of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in 2023, Barbaro plays Mira Murati, the tech giant’s chief technology officer and boardroom insider. Barbaro was drawn to Murati’s trajectory, from a girl raised amid the tumultuous collapse of communism in 1990s Albania to rare tech billionairess: “I found it to be incredibly interesting that she was a rarity.”

Givenchy by Sarah Burton dress; Aquazzura heels; Tiffany & Co. jewelryCredit: Amy Harrity

Opposite Barbaro is Garfield as Altman. “I mean, he’s one of the best actors of his generation, our generation,” Barbaro says. “I just learned a lot from his approach to the material and to developing character, and I felt very fortunate to get to witness that in real time.” Garfield inspired her to dig deep: “Oh shit, I really have to step up my game and make sure I’m a proper, legitimate scene partner.”

Artificial will drop in a Hollywood contending with AI’s ongoing threat to creatives (shortly before Barbaro and I meet, Ayo Edebiri is spotted wearing a T-shirt that read “do not talk to me about AI, I will kill myself”). In June, the biopic was dropped by its original distributor, Amazon MGM Studios, a few months after Amazon invested $50 billion in OpenAI. Neon, the indie studio behind Best Picture winners Anora and Parasite, later announced it had resurrected Artificial with reported plans to release it in time for this year’s Oscar race.

“I don’t want to sound callous about it, but I wasn’t concerned,” Barbaro says of the shuffle, suggesting the film’s fate wasn’t uncertain for as long as it may have seemed. “I just trusted so much of the feedback I was getting about the movie, that it was really well liked, and I trust in Luca.” The endlessly buzzy director of Call Me By Your Name and Challengers called Barbaro for a meeting shortly after her debut at last year’s Met Gala. (It was yet another breakout moment for Barbaro, in which the actress, a Dior ambassador, wore custom, vintage-inspired suiting and a jaunty boater hat by the French fashion house.) They shot the film before the summer was over.

The opening beats of Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” waft through the Whitney café, thanks to a man seated nearby, loudly blaring Reels on his phone. Barbaro and I laugh, but it’s a fitting soundtrack, given the rising temperature of her career. An exception to Hollywood’s ageist convention, Barbaro is burning brighter every year. Next, she’s bound for one of Hollywood’s glitziest ensembles: Bradley Cooper and Margot Robbie’s untitled Ocean’s Eleven prequel, trailing Danny Ocean’s enigmatic parents to 1960’s Monaco. “I’m so excited,” Barbaro whispers, as if to contain herself from shrieking.

Earlier this year, she made her West End debut in the hallowed National Theatre adaptation of the psycho-sexual French novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses. “It kind of felt like I got to go to drama school,” Barbaro says of playing Madame de Tourvel, a pillar of virtue in a sea of corruption, alongside British stage legend Lesley Manville. Barbaro’s dance background enhanced the show: Once the choreographer realized the depth of her training, they expanded a contemporary number—“the prayer dance”—in which de Tourvel tangles with a male troupe, depicting her inner turmoil. It was a full-circle moment, Barbaro says, that “felt like home.” Broadway now beckons. “Oh God, I would love to,” Barbaro swoons as I pitch her on A Chorus Line revival, maybe a Fosse vehicle?

Like Barbaro herself, her career defies categorization. From Oscar fare to naughty rom-coms and the prestige of the theater, “different work speaks to your soul in different ways,” she says. The nod from the Academy was an unexpected honor, even if Barbaro claims she’s been stress-acne-prone ever since, “but it’s also been important to me to not let that define my choices.” She didn’t shy away from One Night Only, for example, for fear that a rom-com would ruin her cred. “I guess it could, but I want to navigate [my career] in a way where I get to choose what I want to do in the same way that I don’t want to take my clothes off because I ‘have to.’” Her tastes are as unstuffy as she is. One of Barbaro’s all-time favorite movies? Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion. “Top Gun also was an Oscar movie,” she points out with a knowing laugh of the sequel’s Best Picture nod. Barbaro now has a say in what’s worthy: She’s a new Academy member herself.

Dior dress.Credit: Amy Harrity

Despite her ongoing breakthrough, Barbaro still deals with rejection. For a long time, she reasoned, “Well, I’m not a big enough actor yet,” but her response is shifting. “My favorite rejection is when [the part] goes to someone older and I’m like, Great, because that’s the only place I’m headed! Get it, queen!” Yes, the actress who thought she was over-the-hill at 21 is jubilant at what’s to come.

Not to be a buzzkill, but I have to wonder if more roles and more recognition translate to not only more industry power, but also more unwanted attention and lurking paparazzi. “I can mostly escape it, personally, but I think I’m constantly doing projects where people go, ‘That’s about to change,’” she says. Currently, Barbaro is less so approached for “a cheap photo” and mostly by fans who tell her they like her work, then run away. She’d love to keep it like that—“just the occasional confidence boost,” Barbaro quips. Powell is good for it: “The point is, I love Monica,” he said in closing his voicenote soliloquy. “Everybody should love Monica.” To the thumping beats of Nelly, I find myself hoping that she becomes a huge star who somehow escapes all the corrosive properties of fame. She’d never brag, but if anyone could pull it off, it just might be Barbaro.

Credits -

Photographer

Amy Harrity

Stylist

Kevin Huynh

Hair Stylist

Owen Gould

Makeup Artist

Samantha Lau

Manicurist

Emi Kudo

Directors

Ben South & Eric Michael Roy of Cutting Board TV

Video Team

Sam Grant, Jake Deverian & Ryland Holeman

Styling Assistants

Joe Gonzalez & Lee Kosse

Production Assistant

Smith + Union

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Original Article on Source

Source: “AOL Entertainment”