As Maria Callas, Angelina Jolie Had To Find Her Voice To Lose It

In Maria, the actor takes on La Divina for the final act of director Pablo Larrain’s trilogy on iconic 20th-century women.

Maria, Pablo Larrain’s cinematic portrait of opera legend Maria Callas, arrives as the third of the director’s films centred on iconic women of the 20th century.

And like the other films in the trilogy – Jackie (2016), which starred Natalie Portman as Jacqueline Kennedy navigating the days after her husband’s assassination, and Spencer (2021) starring Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana during Christmas 1991 – Maria situates its titular diva in the midst of her own existential crisis.

At the centre of nearly every frame is Angelina Jolie, delivering one of the strongest performances of her career as La Divina in the final weeks of her life. (She died of a heart attack in 1977 at 53.) Larrain’s ingenious production mixes archival recordings of Callas with the diminished star of Jolie’s Callas. The actress not only had to learn everything about opera – how to sing, how to breathe, how to stand, how to speak Italian – she had to sound like it was all being taken from her.

We find Jolie’s Callas straining to regain the heft and thrust of the voice that once carried her around the world. She has also loosened her grip on reality through a steady diet of methaqualone pills – which take on a life of their own. The film unfurls like a dream, with one reality giving way to the next. Larrain imagines the singer’s final days through an entrancing blend of reliable structures (three acts and an epilogue) and disorienting shifts of texture and time.

They may nitpick Jolie’s portrayal, but opera lovers will surely delight at the film’s soundtrack, an unceasing current of Verdi, Bellini, Puccini, Donizetti, Cherubini and even a dash of Wagner. But even those who have never set foot in an opera house will sympathise with Jolie’s portrayal of a woman learning, at long last, to sing for herself.

I recently had the chance to talk opera with Jolie (a relative newbie) and Larrain (a seasoned enthusiast). This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Q: You both came to opera at very different stages in your life. What was the experience that opened up the art form for each of you?

Angelina Jolie: For me, it really was this one. I had been to opera when I was younger and was impressed at the power of it, the size of it. But I was very young, I didn’t quite understand it. There are certain feelings and emotions and things that you understand as an adult − maybe you’ve been through more loss or more pain or lived a longer life. So when you have those kind of deeper experiences and then you feel a performance that expresses such gravitas, it meets you somewhere because you’ve lived a longer life, it meets a part of you that’s understood more as you age. But, [to Larrain] you were young.

Pablo Larraín: Yeah, I went to the opera as I grew up, thanks to my parents, especially my mother. Back home where I grew up in Santiago, Chile the opera house is a very beautiful building, and they still have a very good repertoire. Opera became actually my first approach to any artistic form. I would spend time watching a great opera, and the next day I’d go to see Back to the Future. I grew up with both mediums, and it just changed my life. There’s something so infinite and undescribable in opera. You don’t need to be very rational to approach it.

Q: I’ve read that to technically prepare for this, there were two types of vocal coaching: one for diction and one for the actual singing. Did you make any unique discoveries about yourself in each setting?

Jolie: So many. Yes. The first was traditional singing − so it was a lot of breathing, posture, pitch, sound, the basics. In that, I discovered how much I was holding inside. I think you realise to sing and breathe you have to acknowledge where you’re at, where your body’s at. I wasn’t expecting it to be a real study of myself. But so much comes through someone’s voice, and to be able to let your real voice through, you have to be very open. I found that I was a soprano, I did not know that. I would not have guessed that.

Larrain: Of course you are!

Jolie: Then there were Italian classes. And then an opera singer would come in, and that changed everything. The biggest discovery was how different even the teaching was, because of the different ways you use your whole instrument. The way you use the shape of your mouth and your breath. There was different technique and it was really surprising and made me quite in awe of opera singers.

Q: Given that technology could do so much to fill in blanks or simulate this or that, what was the goal in capturing the raw material of the voice?

Larrain: There’s no AI here, or sophisticated software. There is a very simple process that is very demanding for the actor, in this case, Angie. You can’t cheat in opera. She had to really, really sing. For each of the six arias she sings, she had to really follow that pitch, the melody. Whatever the colour of her voice is, it’s obviously different from Maria, but you cannot pretend that you’re doing it.

The way it was made is that she had an earpiece [playing back] Callas’ voice and the orchestra, and then she’d sing by herself, alone. There was no other sound on the set. We’d capture every single sound she made − not only the singing, but the breathing. Later, in post-production, we’d mix it and find the right sync; but that only happened because she sang in the right pitch, with the right timing. Obviously, you don’t want to make a movie about Maria Callas without Maria Callas’ voice – that would [not] be very interesting, I think. But we do have Angie’s voice sometimes 1%, sometimes 2%, sometimes 5%. There are scenes at the end of the film that it’s more like 60% Angie’s voice. That’s not just for the technicality of listening to her voice, but because it was the right way to approach the character.

Q: I loved the film’s three-act plus epilogue structure, but most operatic to me was the general predicament of the film itself, that being a heroine coming undone, which is such a tried and true operatic trope. I wonder for both of you how the presence of stubborn operatic tropes informed the way that you approached this character and this story.

Jolie: So much of it. I think those who study and know their opera and their arias will see the extra layers within this piece, but you don’t have to understand this film. But if you do know them and you know what “Vissi d’arte” means, you know why those words in that moment are so important. I had to think about Maria’s life, how she played these other women and their experiences. The story within the story within the story in this film is very complex and done in a way that makes it accessible to everyone.

Larrain: I think there’s something related to the structure of the bel canto tradition that Maria embraced so much. But there’s not just the three acts plus the epilogue − there’s also the overture, where most of the main themes are explored. In our opening, it’s the Ave Maria from Verdi’s Otello, because that’s one of those themes − she’s asking for help from God. As Angelina is saying, there’s a map of the film [in the music] − you can see that when there’s an aria from La Traviata, that moment of the opera is reflected in what we see in the film. Same with Tosca, Norma, Madame Butterfly and Anna Bolena.

There was also the decision not to subtitle [the arias]. I refused. We tried, and it was too confusing. Why are we doing this? Let it just be the flow of the emotion. Let’s just keep our eyes on the movie, on Angie and what she’s playing. At some point, this is a movie about a singer who becomes the sum of the tragedies that she plays onstage. I think that somehow, she ended up inhabiting those characters forever.

Maria will be released in New Zealand cinemas on January 30, 2025.

More Hollywood

From in-depth profiles to fascinating features, cinema stars in their own words.

How Hollywood flipped the May-December romance so older women rule. Older female actors have been getting their groove back. And some aren’t even done.

Phoebe Dynevor: ‘One minute you’re washing the dishes, the next you’re at the Met Ball'. The Bridgerton star and newly anointed luxury ambassador reflects on her meteoric rise.

Rachel McAdams is not afraid of the dark. From Mean Girls to her Broadway debut in Mary Jane, the actor views her career choices as expanding her orbit.

With his big blockbuster looming, how did Paul Mescal go from ‘normal person’ to superstar? He’s one of the most in-demand leading men. Will Gladiator II change him?

Is Mikey Madison dancing her way to an Oscar? Immersed in the role, the introverted actor got ‘almost too comfortable’ in strip clubs.