How Top Gun: Maverick star Monica Barbaro developed a pilot's swagger

As Top Gun: Maverick enters its second weekend in theaters, after giving Tom Cruise the biggest box office opening of his career, some of the conversation around the film is shifting to the performances from the ensemble of gifted young actors who surround Cruise. One of those stars is Monica Barbaro, who plays “Phoenix,” one of Pete “Maverick” Mitchell’s trainees. Barbaro—who had demonstrated versatility in small-screen roles on the Lifetime dramatic series Unreal, NBC’s Chicago Justice, and ABC’s Splitting Up Together—stands out in the film because of her thoughtful, understated authority.

As Phoenix, Barbaro represents a vital but often forgotten segment of service women who excel alongside their male counterparts. She spoke to The A.V. Club about her role, and the responsibility she and the filmmakers shouldered, to make this female character a true equal among peers. Barbaro also revealed the paces that Cruise and director Joe Kosinski put the cast through to give them the confidence—down to their walk to and from the planes—to play pilots, and talked about what she hopes to tackle next.

Monica Barbaro: Yeah, it was such an interesting challenge. I thought it was necessary, and I think we all thought it was necessary to represent women in some specific way where every woman in the world feels represented by this one character—and ultimately we realized that’s absolutely impossible. And then you start to look at it like, no, she’s a character. She’s another naval aviator amongst this group. And I was lucky to have some incredible pilots to learn from in that respect. And I asked them those questions and they said the same thing—“We’re just striving for the day when we’re not female aviators, but we’re just aviators.” And everybody in our production team, Tom [Cruise], Joe [Kosinski], Jerry [Bruckheimer], me, the Navy, everyone cared immensely about having her be shown as a strong, capable pilot who you would trust with your life.

That was made easy [through] the actual pilots that I met who were definitely the kinds of people that we sourced a lot of information to develop this character with. And also just the relationships she has with different people, like her very strong, loyal relationship with Rooster, where she expects the most out of him. And meeting Bob and not necessarily trusting him at first, and then they build a really good bond where they start to stick up for each other. And her feelings on Maverick are like, “Ha ha, who is this guy?” But then immediately being like, “Oh, no, he’s going to give us everything we need to get this done.” So those became the things that I focused on.

AVC: Typically in male-dominated environments we see tough female characters sometimes overcompensating. But there’s a confidence in your performance that’s really fun to watch. You seem to make her an equal as opposed to a competitor.

MB: You’re absolutely right. That was something in the first pass of the script, and in the audition I did, more of that overcompensation look—and it was very fun to play. It’s very outside of who I am, so it was fun. But it also just didn’t feel authentic to the character or to the women that I met and I was flying with. And so hats off to again the production team to be like, we want her to look like someone who just knows she’s really good and her competitive level is the same as the guys’. Like it’s not overt. It’s not aggressive in some way that she thinks she has to be, just to get by. She just knows she’s really, really good at this this thing. She just stands tall because of it.

AVC: You’ve talked about some of the relationships, between you and Rooster, for example. How explicit were those in the script?

MB: We always were told that the backstory of Rooster and Phoenix is that they were in flight school together. She’s known him for a really long time. I think they’re both the kind of people who don’t push in terms of they’re more humble about their abilities, and they formed a bond really early because I think it was pretty clear they could trust each other. And somewhere along the way, they met Hangman, who they discovered pretty quickly that they could not trust. And that means the world to a pilot. Having each other’s back means everything when you’re up there and you know that you guys can support each other.

AVC: All of the actors in the film do a great job conveying a sense of self-assuredness. How difficult was it to develop that sense of confidence, in and out of the cockpit?

MB: Well, it started by receiving this incredible gift as an actor from Tom, which was this all-encompassing flight training program. He sort of gave us backstory in that we spent all this time learning how to fly a basic aircraft, takeoffs, landings, all of that, the lingo. We moved on to an aircraft that was doing aerobatics and we sustained G’s and learned not to pass out and all that during maneuvers. So we would practice maneuvers that would be in the script, like I learned what a split ‘S’ was, which is something he pulls in the first movie—and, like, did one. And then we got to dogfight in L-39s. So by the time we got to the jet, we had a lot of information and we knew what these things sort of felt like. And that was worth its weight in gold. I mean, we had to re-film the scene where we’re walking into the bar, because apparently we started walking differently everywhere we went after we had done all of this. It just gets into your body in a way that changes you and gives you a real sense of swagger, a pep in your step. So that was sort of fed to us very organically through learning as much as possible what these guys do for a living. And it was designed after the naval aviation training courses. I mean, they do it a little bit differently, obviously, but it wasn’t that dissimilar. We told [our real-life counterparts] what we did, and they were like, “Oh yeah, that’s how you learn to do what we do, eventually.” So we were able to bring that with us in our performance, which helps.

AVC: Did you ever expect that you would be taking on a role like this?

MB: I never expected that I would ever have the opportunity to play a fighter pilot. If you’d asked me, I would have been, like, “Yeah, let’s do it!” But I never expected to be handed this opportunity. And when I saw the first movie, I remember being like, “Oh, I’d love to be in a movie like that—but I never thought it could be as a pilot.” And it’s nothing like anything I’ve ever played. I had a conversation with Joe at the beginning right after I was cast, where he was like, “I’ve watched all your material and this isn’t like anything you’ve ever done.” But we went through it in the audition process and I think as an actor, each character you play can be a certain side of yourself, and in terms of humans and how we operate, we’re capable of doing all kinds of things, good and bad. It’s just about what we choose. So not to say an actor who plays an evil character is that person, of course, but maybe they had the opportunity to be that person and chose not to. So I think in this sense, it was something that was within me, or some portion of it was. And I got to just absorb the world around me and bring her out to the best of my ability.

AVC: I’m a huge fan of your work on Unreal. What kind of roles are you looking for in the future?

MB: I have been really lucky to be able to design my career after finding roles that are really different from the last thing I played. So I right now I’m in production for a spy series on Netflix, which as an actor is just a goldmine because you not only get to play one character, but you get to play a character playing seven different characters, as she goes undercover and as she lives her cover life. So that’s a lot of fun, and also it involves a lot of stunts. The back-and-forth between maybe doing something that’s more, I don’t know, classically masculine, and then doing something that’s more stereotypically feminine, I just get to do that dance a lot, which is really, really fun for me. I would love to do a classic period piece after this. But I’m always just looking to to do something different.