Olivia Rodrigo Picks Monica Barbaro for Future Biopic After Mixing Up Photos of the Actress With Herself

LOS ANGELES — Olivia Rodrigo already has an answer for a question most pop stars her age never have to consider: if Hollywood ever makes a movie about her life, she would like Monica Barbaro to play her.

The 23-year-old singer made the remark Tuesday night during a conversation with filmmaker Cameron Crowe at the Grammy Museum in downtown Los Angeles. The program previewed a new exhibit built around the music video for "The Cure," a single from her third studio album, "You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love." Crowe, who is developing a long-planned Joni Mitchell film, asked who should play Rodrigo in a theoretical biopic or a stage version of the new record.

Rodrigo did not hesitate for long.

"Sometimes I see a picture of Monica Barbaro and I'm like, 'Oh, that's a picture of me. Oh no, that's Monica,'" she said. "So maybe her. And she's a fantastic actress."

Crowe endorsed the idea, then pointed out another option sitting across from him.

"Good choice," he said. "But then there's also you."

"Yeah, I could do it," Rodrigo replied. "I mean, you're directing it. You have to cast it." She added, with a laugh, "We'll sidebar."

No biopic is in development. Rodrigo's comments were framed as a hypothetical, and neither she nor Crowe announced any film. Still, the exchange quickly circulated because it combined a concrete casting preference with a joke that she might simply play herself — and that Crowe should be the one to decide.

The remark landed in a room already oriented toward memory and self-mythology. "Olivia Rodrigo: The Cure Unraveled," which opened to the public the following day and is scheduled to run through Feb. 22, 2027, displays handmade sets, props, storyboards and costumes from the video for "The Cure." Directed by Cat Solen and Jaime Gerin, the clip follows Rodrigo through a tactile, hospital-like world as she tries to name a feeling she said she had been chasing for years.

"The concept of 'The Cure' was a feeling that I had been trying to articulate for a really long time, but I didn't really know how," she told Crowe.

In a statement issued before the event, Rodrigo called the museum appearance a full-circle moment. "I grew up going to the Grammy Museum and their mission is especially important to me," she said. "It's the perfect place to feature 'the cure' music video pieces that mean so much to me, as well as some incredibly special items from the past decade that we're later adding that I've never shown before."

Barbaro, best known to mainstream audiences for "Top Gun: Maverick" and for her Oscar-nominated turn as Joan Baez in James Mangold's 2024 Bob Dylan film "A Complete Unknown," has become a frequent point of comparison for Rodrigo among fans who notice similar coloring, bone structure and camera presence. Rodrigo's own explanation was simpler: she sometimes mistakes photographs of the actress for photographs of herself.

That resemblance is only part of the case she made. Barbaro has already done the work a musician biopic demands. For "A Complete Unknown," she learned to sing and play guitar after starting with no practical background on either. She trained with vocal coach Eric Vetro and guitar instructors, then continued practicing on her own during the 2023 industry strikes. Baez's fingerpicking, she later said, was especially difficult.

"Joan's fingerpicking style is so intricate, so specific, and I had no experience at that," Barbaro told the Marin Independent Journal. "I didn't play guitar at all."

The production required the cast to perform music live on set rather than lip-sync to finished tracks. Barbaro has said the musical preparation overhauled her schedule for months and that singing in Baez's register felt more exposing than learning the instrument. She also spoke with Baez by phone while preparing, a conversation she described as generous and surprisingly ordinary. Baez, she recalled, told her she was simply in the garden listening to the birds.

Baez later praised the finished performance. "I loved what she did in the film," she told her hometown paper, the Marin Independent Journal. "If I didn't think she was good at it, I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it in general. But she looked enough like me and she had my gestures down. You could tell who it was. She worked so hard. Kudos to her for taking the role on."

That pedigree matters in a moment when studios continue to chase musician biopics after the commercial success of films about Queen, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and others. "A Complete Unknown" earned more than $140 million worldwide and multiple Academy Award nominations, including one for Barbaro as supporting actress. The industry lesson has been consistent: audiences will accept an actor as a famous musician if the voice, posture and live performance feel earned.

Rodrigo already has a head start that many music subjects do not. Before "drivers license" made her a global pop figure in 2021, she was a working child actor. She starred in the Disney series "Bizaardvark" and later in "High School Musical: The Musical: The Series," leaving the latter after its third season as her recording career accelerated. Crowe's onstage reminder that she could play herself was not idle flattery. She has camera training, comic timing and a public life that has been documented since adolescence.

She also has the kind of catalog Hollywood tends to treat as ready-made narrative. "Sour," released in 2021, and "Guts," released in 2023, both debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. "You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love," released June 12, became her third consecutive chart-topping studio album. It opened with 485,000 equivalent album units in the United States, the largest week of 2026 for any album by a solo artist, according to figures reported by Billboard from Luminate. The album spent a second week at No. 1. Lead single "Drop Dead" reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Follow-up "The Cure" became another major hit, and "Stupid Song" later arrived as a third single.

The new record is built as a two-sided story of one relationship, moving from infatuation to rupture. Rodrigo has described it as a time capsule of a romance that began in exhilaration and ended in disappointment. That structure, plus her Disney-to-stadium arc, is the sort of life story producers pitch as both intimate and commercially obvious. It is also why Crowe's hypothetical was less random than it sounded. He has spent his career moving between music journalism, concert films and narrative features, and he used the museum conversation to talk through songwriting, image-making and the temptation to turn a young artist's life into theater before the life is finished.

Rodrigo is still in the middle of that life. She is 23. She recently staged Daisy Chain Fields, an all-women festival in Irvine, California, that paid homage to the spirit of Lilith Fair and featured artists including Chappell Roan, Doechii, Mitski, Bikini Kill, the Breeders, Garbage, Sarah McLachlan, Alanis Morissette and Stevie Nicks. Festival organizers said the event would direct proceeds to groups working on women's rights and reproductive health; Rodrigo announced a $10 million donation, later joined by a matching pledge from philanthropist Melinda French Gates.

Next comes the road. The Unraveled Tour is scheduled to open Sept. 25 in Hartford, Connecticut, and run through May 10, 2027, in London, with dozens of arena dates in North America and Europe. In other words, the period a future screenwriter might one day compress into a second act has not happened yet.

That is why the Barbaro comment functions more as cultural weather than as a production update. Fans immediately split into familiar camps: some argued Rodrigo is too young for a biopic, some said she should play herself, and others circulated alternative names. None of those reactions changes the facts of the evening. Rodrigo named an actress. She praised that actress's work. She acknowledged she could take the part. And she left the casting, jokingly, to the director sitting beside her.

Barbaro has not issued a public response. There is no script, no studio attachment and no timeline. What exists is a useful snapshot of how Rodrigo is being seen at this stage of her career: famous enough that people ask who should play her, young enough that the honest answer may still be "not yet," and self-aware enough to notice when another woman's face looks, for a second, like her own.

If a film ever does get made, the Grammy Museum exchange will likely be quoted in the first wave of coverage. Until then, it remains what it was on Tuesday night — a hypothetical tossed between a pop star and a filmmaker, anchored by a double take in a photograph and by Barbaro's proven ability to disappear into a musician's life without losing the person underneath.