A few years ago, Angelina Jolie was looking to specialise in a certain area. She ended up specialising in a certain aria. In her first acting gig since 2021, Jolie has taken on the Sisyphean singing task of bringing the opera legend Maria Callas to screen. In Maria, a playful, time-hopping biopic directed by Pablo Larraín, Jolie not only talks the talk and walks the walk, she performs the multi-octave music for real – the opera heard in the film is a blend of Callas’s recordings and Jolie’s own voice captured on set.
As a performer whose level of public scrutiny could be compared to Jolie’s relationship with paparazzi, Callas spent her final years practically in hiding, choosing not to perform for audiences or step outside, unless she felt like being recognised by strangers that day. With Steven Knight’s screenplay structured around Callas being interviewed by a journalist, Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee), the film offers a meta take on fame: Mandrax, who’s named after a drug and is possibly fictitious, chucks probing questions at Jolie’s Callas about her personal, professional and romantic life, which prompts flashbacks that Larraín shoots in 35mm, 16mm, and Super 8 formats.
After Jackie and Spencer, Maria completes Larraín’s informal trilogy of well-known movies about well-known women, and also continues Jolie’s evolution into weightier projects. She wrote and directed another film, Without Blood, which will also come out in 2025, and she speaks knowledgeably about opera after having trained in it for seven months. In Corinthia Hotel during the London Film Festival, I spoke to Jolie and Larraín across a table of fruit salads about the therapeutic benefits of singing, the challenges of sounding like one of the greatest opera stars of all time, and being simultaneously a strong and vulnerable woman in front of the camera.
I read an old interview where you said Tomb Raider was therapeutic because of the physical training.
Angelina Jolie: That’s true.
I suppose with opera, there’s that same effect, even if you’re doing it while standing still or sitting down?
Angelina Jolie: I think anything where you’re pushing your body to an extreme, to test yourself against the world, to see what you can do, to see what you have in you – it’s aways a really important thing for people to do. I don’t think we do it enough today. There’s so much focus on people being comfortable today. Something making something easier for somebody. Somebody finding a way to do it the shortest way.
I think it’s the challenge. It’s the thing that you’re not sure that you can do, that you’re terrified of.
When I walk outside of this room, maybe you’ll hear me singing in the corridor.
Pablo Larraín: You’re a singer?
Angelina Jolie: Go for it. You’ve got to.
Oh, no, I was making a stupid joke. I don’t even sing in the shower.
Pablo Larraín: Me neither. I’m with you.
Angelina Jolie: [to Larraín] You should do it. I cannot believe you’ve never sung opera.
Pablo Larraín: No.
Angelina, you need to direct Pablo singing in a movie.
Angelina Jolie: I feel like he owes me that, don’t you?
“Anything where you’re pushing your body to an extreme, to test yourself against the world, to see what you can do – it’s aways a really important thing for people to do. I don’t think we do it enough today. There’s so much focus on people being comfortable” – Angelina Jolie
Pablo, I understand that you’re the camera operator on Maria, and so when the camera is moving it’s like you and Angelina are reacting to each other. Is this film a duet?
Angelina Jolie: We were dancing.
Pablo Larraín: Yeah, I agree. [The cinematographer] Ed Lachman says that the camera operator is the first audience. There’s truth there. It’s a movie where the camera is very, very close to Angelina most of the time, and there’s an intimacy to this way of working. Between takes, we didn’t talk much. We just knew what was happening by the way we looked at each other.
Angelina Jolie: Also – we’ve never talked about this – it really helps when your director is behind the camera. It draws something out of you that you want to communicate. [Turns to Larraín] I wanted to communicate something to you. I knew you were there to catch it. But I was also speaking to you through this.
When you’re acting, you probably have the director in the back of your head. But here, you had Pablo right there.
Angelina Jolie: Yeah. We’re onstage together in the opera. We’re in the dressing room. I’m crying and weeping, and he’s sitting next to me.
Pablo Larraín: It minimised the amount of takes dramatically. I almost never went to the monitor to see the playback because I just saw it. It’s not only in the eyepiece, but it’s a physical thing. You see everything. It works.
Angelina Jolie: It’s probably why he draws so much intimacy out of his characters and actors. When you see his films and really feel something with the performances, it’s because he’s so connected to them.
Is there a difference between training to sing opera, and training to look like you can sing opera?
Pablo Larraín: There’s a huge difference. You can’t cheat opera. You can’t pretend you’re singing. She really sang it, all the way through. She trained for seven months to get that. It’s not like playing a record and listening to the Rolling Stones, where everyone can follow the melody in a decent way. You can’t do that with this. It’s impossible to follow the beats of the melody.
Angelina Jolie: You’ve just got to jump in. It’s partly why it’s so therapeutic. You can’t hold anything back. Those who are talented enough to actually do it brilliantly – it’s very special. I can’t wait to go again. I think we’re going to New York, to Tosca.
Pablo Larraín: Yes.
Is there a lot of practising your singing in front of the mirror beforehand, to know what it’ll look like? Even if you’re brushing your teeth, perhaps, and feeling curious?
Angelina Jolie: I didn’t, no. It’s one of the reasons I don’t watch my films, or ever watch takes when I’m on camera. It’s very important to not be self-conscious. If you’re an actor, you need to get rid of your vanity and that thought, and look as weird as you might look sometimes, and doing whatever it is that you need to do.
So no. I didn’t know what I looked like singing until I saw the movie, and saw how my lip was quivering, or what my throat was doing. I had no idea what that looked like.
Pablo Larraín: I did.
Angelina Jolie: He did, yeah [laughs]. I might have been more hesitant had I looked at myself.
“The strongest people in the world are the ones who are able to be honest and open with their emotional life”
Pablo, you’ve done films like Ema and Neruda that play with the musicality of memory and time, and sometimes people have conversations with people from other time periods within the same scene. What made you want to do something similar with Maria Callas?
Pablo Larraín: Cinema is one of the greatest time machines that humans have created. It’s also a great way to approach human perception of reality. I see things. I see colours. I see that flower. I see you. I see my phone, and that I’ve got a message. I have a memory. I hear music from outside that triggers something. Perception is very complex. We’re always being invaded by emotions, ideas, and memories. This film tries to do that with her perception.
What I love about Angie’s take is that she’s the kind of actor who can let you in when she wants, and she can just block you when she wants to. I don’t know if it’s a conscious control or not. That’s more for her to answer. That creates a very interesting interaction with the audience, because the movie is not completed. You, as the audience, have to complete those blank spaces. But when she lets you in, she’s showing you what she’s thinking, what she’s singing, what she’s listening to, what she’s remembering. That interaction, I think, is something that cinema can do.
Maria Callas is so strong and vulnerable at the same time. When I say those words out loud, it sounds contradictory, because how can you be strong and vulnerable at the same time?
Angelina Jolie: I think that’s true, though. The strongest people in the world are the ones who are able to be honest and open with their emotional life.
Should young people be listening to more opera?
Angelina Jolie: Yes, and to not see it as something that doesn’t belong to them. I felt that growing up as an American and somebody of a different generation. I thought: this isn’t really for me. I was completely wrong. Everybody should sit in the dark, put it on, and let it have its effect. I think they’ll fall in love with it.
Maria is out in UK cinemas on January 10
