Monica Barbaro on Phoenix and her rise in Top Gun: Maverick
It’s Top Gun: Maverick Week here at For The Win, where we’ve taken to the skies for five days of content to celebrate the premiere of the sequel to 1986’s iconic ode to naval aviation. Strap in for a wild ride (no spoilers!).
When the original Top Gun released in 1986, women were still seven years from being allowed to fly combat missions for the Navy. As a result, there were only two actresses in a major role: Kelly McGillis as contractor-turned-Maverick’s-love-interest Charlie and Meg Ryan as Goose’s wife Carole.
In the long-awaited sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, we finally get to see a woman in the cockpit as Monica Barbaro portrays Phoenix, a pilot that is vying for a spot in the challenging and dangerous mission that Maverick (Tom Cruise) is training them to do.
Today, women make up just 12 percent of all Navy pilots, and Barbaro felt pressure to play Phoenix in a way that would make them proud. “It was just an incredible honor to represent the female aviators that I got to meet and got to fly with,” Barbaro said during the Top Gun: Maverick press junket. She took some of those female aviators with her to the movie’s premiere and was grateful for their support throughout the whole process.
The movie doesn’t burden Phoenix with a romantic storyline, but clearly establishes her friendship with Rooster (Miles Teller), contentious rivalry with Hangman (Glen Powell) and fantastic working relationship with her weapon systems operator, Bob (Lewis Pullman). The message? She’s an incredible pilot who just happens to be a woman.
“Initially she was written like she was overcompensating for the fact that she was a woman in the original script and being the bro-iest bro of the crew,” Barbaro said of Phoenix’s beginnings. While Monica and the rest of the actors were in training, Jerry Bruckheimer, Joe Kosinski and leading man Tom Cruise had already started tweaking her character.
“As I was in training, they were like, ‘OK, just FYI, she’s changing a lot,'” Barbaro said. “It was really important to Tom and Joe and Paramount, and then also so important to the Navy and our pilot consultants, to represent her in that strong, capable way where she’s just really confident about what she’s great at and not overcompensating for everything.”
The training Barbaro and her cast mates had to go through was intense and included water survival and high G training to prepare them for all of the demanding flying scenes. Despite all that training, flight hours in an F/A-18, and becoming a movie star, Barbaro has remained humble about the process. There is one thing she refuses to stay cool about, however.
“They made a Phoenix Barbie, which I think is like, the coolest thing on the planet. It’s the only thing I refuse to be humble about. It’s super cool.”
The original Top Gun led to an increase in applications to the Naval Academy and greater interest in aviation, and Bruckheimer hopes the sequel will inspire a new generation.
“I think it’s terrific, I really do,” Bruckheimer said. “I’m so thrilled that on the first movie a lot of fathers took their sons and Navy recruiting went up 500 percent after the first one. A lot of the pilots that we talked to said, ‘I joined the Navy because I saw Top Gun,’ and I think it’s going to happen all over again.”
Barbaro felt similarly regarding the reach this film could have.
“I became very close with a lot of the guys at Top Gun and to the instructors … the way they talked about hoping their daughters would be interested in aviation I think was cool.
“I think in a big way, watching a big media movie represent a woman in a way that that she’s strong and capable and cool … this is why representation matters. You need evidence of these things and you need to see it to be like, ‘OK, that’s a possibility for me’ or ‘ Oh, that is a possibility for my for my daughter.'”
“It’s an honor,” Barbaro said of depicting a naval aviator. “They’re big shoes to fill.”
Top Gun: Maverick hits theaters worldwide on May 27.