If you’re going to play legendary opera singer Maria Callas in a movie, you’re going to have to know how to sing—or be very, very good at faking it. For Angelina Jolie in Maria on Netflix, which began streaming today, both of these things are true.
Directed by Pablo Larraín—in this third “iconic woman” biopic, following 2016’s Jackie and 2021’s Spencer—with a script by Steven Knight (who also wrote Spencer), Maria star Jolie as Greek opera singer Maria Callas. Callas is known not just for her incredible voice, but also her diva persona, health struggles, and romantic scandals. Maria opts to focus in on the final days of her life, when she was living in near-isolation in Paris in the 1970s. She died of a heart attack in 1977, when she was only 53.
Though Maria is set at the end of Callas’s life, after her singing career was long over, much of the movie is centered on the once-great singer attempting to rebuild her voice. And for that, Jolie needed to do a lot of singing.
Angelina Jolie really is singing opera in Maria, but it’s not only Jolie’s voice in the final product. The movie blended Jolie’s singing voice with recordings of the real Maria Callas, so the result is a hybrid of both Jolie and Callas’s voice.
“We recorded [Jolie’s] voice, her breathing, everything,” director Pablo Larraín explained in an interview for the Maria press notes. “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. And then sometimes, it’s more Angelina than Callas. It’s a multilayered track that has different voices. So, Angelina really had to go for it not only because it made the movie more possible in terms of the illusion, but to also create the right process for her as an actress.”
In other words, even though it’s not purely Jolie’s voice that you hear in the film, Jolie still had to learn how to sing opera—and she had to learn how to sing it well.
“Angie had different stages in her preparation,” Larraín in that same interview. “At the start, it was with opera singers and coaches who helped her have the right posture, breathing, movement and the accent. She was singing very specific operas or arias, and most of them are in Italian. You have to sing it properly and get to the right pitches, and that means being able to follow the melody and sing it properly.”
Larraín went on to explain that Jolie would sing along with Callas’s recording, and try to match it as closely as possible.
“There isn’t a miracle kind of technology here,” the director said. “Angelina was absolutely exposed to singing, sometimes in front of 200 people, or 500 extras, and she had to sing out loud by herself, and all people would hear was Angie’s voice alone. I would have my headphones on, I would listen to the orchestration, a little bit of Callas, and a little bit of Angie, so I was sort of mixing live. But she was metaphorically naked, voice wise, in front of hundreds of people.”
For her part, Jolie said that in learning to sing opera, “the challenge wasn’t the technical, it was an emotional experience to find my voice, to be in my body, to express. You have to give every single part of yourself. 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.”
And the star was more than happy to star the stage with the late opera singer. “It would be a crime to not have her voice through this, because in many ways, she is very present in this film,” Jolie said in an interview for the movie’s press notes. “Her voice and her art are very present. She’s the partner in this film with me; she and I are doing this together. It was an honor and sometimes a bit of a head trip to be me playing her, and us playing a third person on stage.”