Angelina Jolie has entered the awards conversation with her towering performance as Maria Callas in Maria, currently playing in select theaters before hitting Netflix on December 11, 2024. Jolie’s revelatory performance has been hailed for her superb portrayal of the world-famous soprano and the authentic singing she does in the film. To perfect her performance, Jolie underwent extensive vocal training despite never singing publicly before in her life.
With her grand performance, Jolie is almost certain to contend for her second Academy Award following Girl, Interrupted in 2000. Her stunning vocal range and real-life singing bring extraordinary authenticity to Maria. To understand how Jolie achieved such melodious heights, it’s worth exploring her training process and explaining how she almost lip-synced the role before pushing her unseen singing talents to the fore.
What Is Netflix’s ‘Maria’ About?
Maria is a biographical psychodrama directed by Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín from a screenplay by Steven Knight. The third leg of Larraín’s unofficial biographical trilogy of public female figures behind Jackie and Spencer, Maria concerns Maria Callas, a Greek-American operatic soprano who became one of the world’s most famous of her kind.
Those familiar with the filmmaker’s work know he avoids sweeping cradle-to-grave biopics and focuses on a concentrated period in the subject’s life. Maria chronicles the final days of Maria’s time in Paris, where she struggled to balance her public image with the mounting pressures of celebrity. Maria is a celebrated soprano who reaches unparalleled heights, yet she’s a self-aggrandized diva and pampered Prima Donna who is completely out of touch with reality.
Bucking traditional biopic conventions, Maria becomes a fascinating character study of a famous public figure grappling with her relationship with the public. Her main conflict comes after being forced to retire at 49 due to poor health, wrestling with her life’s legacy in her final days. Although Maria has been criticized for being too cold and distant and Jolie’s inability to separate her own celebrity from Callas’, the most authentic parts of the movie include Jolie’s singing.
Angelina Jolie’s Training Regiment for ‘Maria’
Larrain deliberately modulated many original Callas recordings with Jolie’s natural singing voice to recreate Maria Callas’ singing voice. When Jolie was cast, she expressed fear of singing in the movie. Larrain told Vanity Fair:
“How can you make a movie about Maria Callas without using her voice? You can’t. You can’t make a movie like this with an actress that is not actually singing it. This is the real thing—it was very scary for her, but she did it.”
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When asked about her training, the director said it was “very long, very particular, very difficult.” Jolie spent six or seven months training with Oscar-winning Sound Editor John Warhurst to get the tone and tenor right. Once Jolie learned the rhythms and cadence of Callas, Larrain and Warhusrt would record her singing live and mix it with Callas’ original recordings. As Larrain tells Vanity Fair:
“You always listen to Angelina and you always listen to Maria Callas. When we listen to Maria Callas in her prime, most of the sound is Callas—90%, 95%—and when we listen to Callas older and in the present, almost all of it is Angelina.”
It was so truthful, we just kept rolling and let her do her thing. She can let you in when she wants, and she can create a distance where she wants. It’s a dance of vulnerability. It’s very intimate because this is a film where the camera is often very close to her — so we were together all the time. Sometimes she would feel me. We would complete a take and she would look at me, just by the way I would look at her.”
Angelina Jolie Speaks About Her Preparation for ‘Maria’
Jolie spoke about her experience of making Maria at AFI Fest (via Variety), confessing:
“I’ve been holding a lot for a long time, and that beginning and that sound, and then when that sound would eventually come, it was the best therapy I’ve ever had. Honestly, I think I would tell a lot of people before you try therapy and spend too much time there, go to singing class. It helped me a lot.
There’s something primal about finding your own voice within your own body. It brings up certain emotions that you may have not wanted to confront, and there’s no way to sing at your full voice and your full emotion without confronting your feelings and your limitations.”
Jolie’s seven-month training regiment consisted of taking voice lessons and courses in Italian, opera, and breathing techniques and honing in on the arias she had to perform live on screen. It wasn’t easy for Jolie emotionally, who told The Hollywood Reporter:
“My first class, I cried. I was sad, I was scared. It was a strange physical body reaction. I stood there, and [the instructor] said, ‘OK, just be in your body. Take a deep breath, let it all out and just open your mouth and just let that sound come from the inside.’ And that’s when I became really emotional. You discover how much we lock our pain in our bodies. Our voice gets tight, our shoulders go high, we get stomach aches, we do all these things, and it’s a protection for us.”
By exposing a vulnerable side unseen before, Jolie’s revelatory singing performance in Maria has led to her best screen performance in years. Maria opened theatrically on November 27 in select theaters and hits Netflix on December 11, 2024
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