Most actors get a dialect coach for a big role. Monica Barbaro got Tom Cruise and a syllabus of aircraft that ended in an F/A-18. Four years after Top Gun: Maverick made her Lieutenant Natasha “Phoenix” Trace, the call sign has been joined by an Oscar nomination, a run at London’s National Theatre and, on October 11, 2026, a red carpet in London with Andrew Garfield. Here is how she trained for the jet, what keeps her in shape, and what has changed since we first wrote about her in 2022.
Phoenix, and the flight school Tom Cruise built
In Top Gun: Maverick (2022), Cruise’s Pete Mitchell comes back to teach a new class of Navy pilots, and Phoenix is the one who never needs saving. Barbaro has explained in interviews that the cast went through a flight program Cruise designed himself. It started in a Cessna to learn basic aerodynamics, moved to an Extra aerobatic plane for G-force work, then to an L-39 jet, and only then to the F/A-18. By the time they reached the Navy jet, she said, they were no longer troubleshooting their own bodies and could actually enjoy the ride.
The detail I like best is how unglamorous it was. Cruise and director Joseph Kosinski drilled the cast down to the way they walked to and from the planes, because a pilot’s confidence shows before she ever climbs in. (Most of us practise our walk only when a waiter is watching.) What strikes me is that the training was never about looking fit on screen. It was about being able to act, and remember lines, while pulling G’s.
The routine: a dancer first, a gym second
Barbaro, who was born in San Francisco in 1990, trained in ballet before she trained for anything with wings. She studied dance at UC Irvine and acting at NYU’s Tisch graduate program, and on Maverick the flying sat on top of swimming plus endurance and strength work in the gym. That is the honest answer to “how does she stay in shape”: years of a discipline that rewards stamina and posture, not a secret plan.
Her Instagram tells the same story in a quieter voice: hikes, set photos, rehearsal rooms, the occasional face mask at home. My read is that her fitness is a working tool, like a carpenter’s hands, and she treats it that way. In 2022 our original piece guessed at the rest; we have dropped the guessing.
From Phoenix to Joan Baez to the Lyttelton stage
When we first wrote about her, Barbaro was “the breakout from Maverick“, best known before that for UnREAL and The Good Cop. Then she played Joan Baez opposite Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown, sang the songs herself, and earned a Best Supporting Actress nomination at the 2025 Academy Awards. In February 2026 she appeared in Bart Layton’s heist thriller Crime 101 with Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Barry Keoghan and Halle Berry. From 21 March to 6 June 2026 she played Madame de Tourvel in Marianne Elliott’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the National Theatre, opposite Lesley Manville and Aidan Turner.
Eight shows a week in a corset is its own kind of endurance training, and I would argue it is the most telling choice on the list. Nobody takes a stage role in London to stay famous; you take it to get better.
The love life she would rather not discuss
In 2022 nobody knew whether Barbaro was seeing anyone; she went to the Maverick premiere alone. That has changed. She has been linked to Andrew Garfield since February 2025, and the two have kept it almost entirely off the record. They now share a film: in Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, about the days in 2023 when Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI and reinstated, Garfield plays Altman and Barbaro plays chief technology officer Mira Murati. After a world premiere at the New York Film Festival on October 5, the film had its UK gala at the BFI London Film Festival on October 11, and the two walked the Royal Festival Hall carpet together. She wore ice-blue sequins; he wore khaki green and looked, as usual, faintly apologetic about the cameras.
Beyond a rare kind word from Garfield during the film’s press run in September, neither has said much in public, and I respect the restraint. A shared red carpet for a shared film is about as loud as these two get.
Our take
The 2022 version of this story wanted to know her diet, her boyfriend and her beauty secrets. The 2026 answer is less gossipy and more interesting: a dancer who learned to fly because the job asked her to, then kept choosing work that asks more. Phoenix never needed rescuing, and neither, it turns out, does the career.
Sources
- Monica Barbaro on Instagram: BFI London Film Festival, October 2026
- Monica Barbaro on Instagram (@monicabarbaro)
- Top Gun: Maverick, Monica Barbaro interview (video)
- USNI Proceedings: Flight of the Phoenix (September 2022)
- The Gate: Monica Barbaro and Lewis Pullman on Top Gun: Maverick
- NBC Bay Area: Barbaro’s Oscar nomination for A Complete Unknown
- National Theatre cast announcement: Les Liaisons Dangereuses
- Crime 101 (2026 film)
- The Playlist: Barbaro joins Guadagnino’s Artificial
- Fiction Horizon: Garfield and Barbaro at the Artificial London premiere (October 2026)
- CinemaBlend: Andrew Garfield’s rare comment about Monica Barbaro (September 2026)
