In Pablo Larraín’s Maria, Angelina Jolie transforms into the late opera diva Maria Callas—not just physically, with her chic French wardrobe, luxurious stage looks, and curly wigs, but also vocally. The film features a mixture of her own live vocals and Callas’s archival recordings, but still, Jolie underwent a lot of training to take on the role and deliver a believable performance.
“When Pablo said, ‘Can you sing?’ I thought, ‘I mean, sure, a little,’” Jolie told Netflix’s Tudum. “But the truth is, as he said to me, ‘You have to learn how to sing opera, or I will be able to tell when we are close on your face, because it’s who she is.’”
The preparation involved training with real opera singers and coaches, Larraín added to Tudum. Jolie revealed to Variety that she trained for “almost seven months.” And her rehearsals only continued during production. “Pablo had a coach with me the entirety of the film and classes nightly after shooting,” she told The Hollywood Reporter.
Even learning how to breathe differently required practice. “The first few weeks were the hardest because my body had to open and I had to breathe again,” she told the Associated Press. “And that was a discovery of how much I wasn’t.”
On set, Jolie would sing with an earpiece in, and she’d sing in front of the cast with no backing track, according to THR. That was daunting, even for the superstar and Oscar winner—especially for the scenes where they recreated Callas’s performances at La Scala, the famed opera house in Milan. Often such scenes required her to sing in front of hundreds of crew members and extras.
“My first time singing I remember being so nervous. My sons were there and they helped lock the door so that nobody else was coming in, and I was shaky,” she recalled to Variety. “Pablo, in his decency, started me in a small room and ended me in La Scala. So he gave me time to grow.”
The vocal performances in the film include songs from Georges Bizet’s Carmen, Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca, and Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma.
Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas in Maria.
In Maria, which follows Callas’s final days in Paris in 1977, Jolie captures the icon in a difficult time of her life, having lost parts of her voice and struggling to build it back. The intimate character study completes Larraín’s trilogy of films about famous but misunderstood women, following Jackie (2016), about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and Spencer (2021), about Princess Diana. In Jolie’s take, she captures a woman resisting defeat, whose emotion she conveys not only through her physicality and dialogue but also in song.
As she told Tudum, “You have to give every single part of yourself.” Jolie added, “When opera singers express pain, it’s not like a little bit, it’s the biggest depth. [It requires] everything that you’ve got. It requires your full body, and it requires you to be full emotionally, as open and as loud, in as big a voice as you can possibly do.”
Jolie’s ability to do that just might explain why she’s already appearing on some Oscar prediction lists for Best Actress.
Although she embodied Callas, Jolie also considers the singer—who died in 1977 at age 53—as her “partner” in the film. “She and I are doing this together,” she told Tudum. Perhaps the blending of their vocals sums that up best.
“There are moments in the film when you hear Maria Callas in her prime, when most of what you hear is Callas, but there’s always a fragment of Angelina,” Larraín added. “And then sometimes, it’s more Angelina than Callas. It’s a multilayered track that has different voices.”