A few weeks before the world would get to see her play Maria Callas, the venerated soprano, Angelina Jolie was savoring her own night at the opera.
On a visit to New York in November, Jolie and Pablo Larraín, who directed her in the biographical film “Maria,” were guests at the Metropolitan Opera, taking in a performance of “Tosca,” the Puccini opera about the relentless diva of its title.
The following afternoon, Jolie and Larraín were chatting excitedly about the spectacle they had seen at the Met — its splendor and majesty; its special place in Callas’ body of work; and its beloved aria, “Vissi d’arte,” in which Tosca declares, “I lived for art, I lived for love.”
It felt like a fitting culmination to Jolie’s lengthy immersion in the life and music of Callas, the stylish, passionate diva who became opera’s greatest star before she withdrew from performing and died in semi-seclusion at the age of 53.
But when Jolie was asked if she could envision herself taking the stage at the Met and showing off some of the skills she’d spent seven months developing for the film, the actor made it clear she harbored no such desires.
“My God,” she answers, as if she’d been asked to sample a cup of sour milk. “That would be my nightmare. That would be terrifying.”
“Maria,” now on Netflix, is a dramatization of how Callas might have lived her final days in 1977, ambling through Paris and reflecting on her past: a troubled childhood; a tempestuous affair with Aristotle Onassis; and a career of artistic triumphs tempered by her enigmatic decision to walk away from all of it.
It’s not hard to imagine why Jolie, 49, an Academy Award-winning actor who has spent decades as an object of public fascination, might identify with Callas: She too has memorably played her share of heroes and villains, mothers, wives and daughters, and she knows all too well what it’s like to be misapprehended by legions of admirers.
Describing the kinship she felt with Callas, Jolie says, “We’re both very emotional women who probably are seen as quite strong but are quite vulnerable, emotional artists who are alone a lot.”
Yet for Jolie to fully embody her role in “Maria,” she would need more than that spiritual bond. The actor could bring her own preternatural poise, and she could wear sumptuous costumes in extravagant settings — even on the stage of La Scala in Milan. But she would also have to set aside a personal fear and learn to sing: Not to match Callas — no one could — but to convince audiences of what they are seeing in the film and to channel a connection that Jolie and Larraín felt was crucial.
“There’s nothing that can help you understand that woman more than being in her art form and feeling the music with her,” Jolie says.
In a living room at a luxury Manhattan hotel, Jolie and Larraín have gathered for a conversation about “Maria” with Massimo Cantini Parrini, the film’s costume designer, and Eric Vetro, who was Jolie’s vocal coach.
Larraín, who previously directed the historical dramas “Jackie” (which starred Natalie Portman as Jacqueline Kennedy) and “Spencer” (in which Kristen Stewart played Princess Diana), says that he was drawn to extraordinary women who were able “to find their own identity and be who they were through their own will and capacity.”
Though Larraín and Jolie had discussed possible collaborations over the years, nothing came to fruition until the director contemplated a film about Callas, whose records he had grown up listening to. Larraín, a lifelong opera fan since his childhood in Santiago, Chile, immersed himself in biographies of Callas and newspaper and magazine articles about her.
Despite all that research, Larraín says, “I’m not sure I knew who she was. I was thinking about making a movie of someone that is indescribable, so mysterious and so magnetic at the same time” — all of which seemed to point him to Jolie.
But when Larraín asked her to play the role, Jolie needed a few days to consider the offer. “I didn’t have the confidence in myself, necessarily, to do it,” she says.
Jolie did not sing, and while Larraín was scouring search engines with the query “Has Angelina Jolie ever sung on camera?” she was hoping to hide the answer from him. “Creatively, as a person, I had a block there,” she notes.
Stretched out casually on a couch in the hotel suite, Jolie could not help but exude a portion of the celebrity wattage she customarily displays onscreen. Throughout the conversation, her “Maria” colleagues routinely praise her physical beauty, her poise and her down-to-earth attitude.
Throughout their work together on “Maria,” Cantini Parrini says, “She kept saying, ‘You guys are my team,’” a lack of pretense that he says was instrumental to establishing “the intimacy that is necessary to create that match between the character and the person.”
Jolie receives these words graciously, but the right compliment can still pierce her defenses. When I describe her — a mother of six, a director, screenwriter, philanthropist and Tony Award-winning producer — as a woman with seemingly boundless capacity, she seems momentarily taken aback.
“Thank you,” she says, after a pause. “You’re the kind of friend I need.”
She is not ashamed, either, to share how the requirements of “Maria” conflicted with her particular sensitivities as a performer.
Vetro, who has also trained such actors as Timothée Chalamet, Austin Butler and Ryan Gosling for their singing roles, describes the first time Jolie visited him at his studio in Toluca Lake.
“I just had this confidence,” Vetro says. “I had this instinct she was going to be able to do it.”
“You can tell the truth of our first meeting,” Jolie responds playfully.
“Well,” Vetro says, “she was very — shall I say — ”
“Nervous!” Jolie interjects.
“Nervous, yes,” Vetro finally agrees. “A little bit of anxiety about it, yeah. ‘Terrified’ would be the word. And when I tried to get her to sing, she started to cry.”
In training with Vetro, Jolie practiced warmup exercises and breath control, the correct pitches, accents and pronunciations for her arias, and — improbable as it might seem for an actor with a famously statuesque presence — how to stand correctly.
“When she would vocalize,” Vetro says, “her posture kind of shrunk — just a little, at the beginning. There were constant reminders to stand up straight, which she never [usually] needs.”
The goal of their work was not to turn Jolie into the defining opera diva of her era — the filmmakers acknowledge that what audiences hear in “Maria” are blended recordings that use Jolie’s vocals as well as original recordings of Callas’ performances.
Larraín said he instead wanted to find a middle ground between his film’s famous subject and its equally eminent leading lady — a way of inverting expectations that Jolie would have to imitate Callas perfectly to play her. “I said to her, ‘No, Angie, there’s something that we have to bring from Callas to you.’”
For all the discomfort she felt about having to sing, Jolie says she also appreciated the challenge presented to her and the demand to deliver at the same level of her colleagues on the film.
“I admire people that take a big swing, even if they fall,” she notes. “When I see people who are careful — too careful — I’m more uncomfortable for them.” But “if I see somebody being emotionally brave or creatively brave, I root for them. I don’t judge them.”
And in those moments when Jolie might have felt that anxiety most acutely — say, re-creating Callas’ performance of “Piangete voi?” from Donizetti’s “Anna Bolena” on the stage of La Scala in front of hundreds of extras and opera house staffers — she could tell herself she was simply singing to her director, who was often just a few feet away from her, operating his own camera.
“When we were both alone onstage together, our job was not to sing,” Jolie explains. “Our job was to perform a character and tell a story through music.”
If it felt overwhelming to shoot the “Anna Bolena” sequence, Jolie says she could at least tell herself, “It’s a mad scene” — a sequence where her character in the opera is supposed to be unraveling. “It’s the hardest,” she adds, “but that day was so beyond my comfort zone.”
Larraín says he had only one direction for Jolie amid that whirlwind of chaos and emotion. Speaking in a stage whisper, he says, “I remember, I was like, ‘Angie, please, louder. Go louder, louder.’”
Jolie is not entirely an open book; there’s a line she delivers in the film as Callas, who is talking about her public reputation and how she’s perceived by the world when she says, “I took liberties all my life, and the world took liberties with me.”
Did the actor, herself a constant target of media scrutiny and speculation, feel any connection to Callas in that way? Jolie simply turns the question back at me: “I think journalists of the world watch this film a little differently,” she says. “When they see the film, they’re very conscious of maybe how their work affected both of us.”
Nor is Jolie particularly gripped by the professional angst that became sadly fulfilling for Callas, whose meteoric career burned out long before she could reach her golden years. “My motherhood is the only thing that I couldn’t live without,” Jolie says. “Truly, you could take everything else. I’d be fine.”
What Jolie says she gained from making “Maria” was the insight into an artist who could not live without her art, and the pleasure of getting to tell that story in the company of other “slightly broken” and “sensitive” people. “I’ve been one my whole life,” she notes.
“Sensitive people feel a lot, and they worry a lot,” she adds. “They also create a lot, and they connect in beautiful ways.
“One of the most beautiful things about being on a film set is you’re with hundreds of others,” she continues to knowing laughter from her colleagues in the room.
“You’ve all found each other,” she says. “You’re all sensitive, you’re all creative, and you’re all a little — you know, unusual. And not necessarily the most stable.”
