Angelina Jolie plays opera singer Maria Callas in her upcoming film with Pablo Larraín, Maria. The film premiered at the 81st Venice International Film Festival, where it received eight minutes of standing ovation, moving Jolie to tears. The Eternals actress revealed that the role made her discover one thing about her voice.
Jolie shared that a past lover had not been nice about her singing voice, which made her deeply insecure. However, she discovered that her voice made her the right person to portray Callas in the film. Jolie also wrote and directed the war film, Without Blood, which will premiere at the Toronto Film Festival next week.
Angelina Jolie Found Her Past Lover’s Opinion On Her Singing Voice To Be Not True After Maria
Angelina Jolie took months to master singing for her role in Pablo Larraín’s Maria. She then took her Italian classes and finally voice lessons to transform herself into the opera singer Maria Callas. In her preparation journey for the film, Jolie discovered that she had the wrong perception of her voice.
Jolie revealed to The Hollywood Reporter that her perception of her singing originated from a previous partner. This romantic partner hadn’t been kind to Jolie about her singing and made her believe that she couldn’t sing at all. She revealed that she adapted to that person’s opinion despite her theater school experience.
Jolie had been married to Jonny Lee Miller, Billy Bob Thornton, and Brad Pitt. She also had a two-year boyfriend in her teen years and reportedly dated Timothy Hutton, Val Kilmer, and The Weeknd. It is unclear which past relationship made her insecure. She had to get past the insecurity to start singing for the role. The Wanted actress told THR:
It was an out-of-body experience because I don’t sing. I had somebody in my life who was not kind to me about singing. It was a relationship I was in. And so I just assumed I couldn’t really sing. I’d been to theater school, so it was weird that it even had an effect on me. I just kind of adapted to this person’s opinion. So it took me getting past a lot of things to start singing.
Moreover, she found out that she was a soprano just like Maria Callas. She believed for most of her life that she had a low voice. It was her training instructor who revealed this info to her, while also sharing that one’s voice changed due to different factors in life. It was a major shock for the actress. She shared:
And discovering also that I was a soprano. I thought I had a low voice my whole life. I was explaining [to the singing instructor] that my voice is deeper, and he said, ‘No, you’re actually a soprano.’ And probably something happened. Your voice changes when you go through different things in your life. So that was a shock. That was very strange.
Besides Jolie, the film also featured Valeria Golino as Callas’ sister Yakinthi and Haluk Bilginer as Aristotle Onassis, the Greek businessman who was rumored to be in a relationship with Callas. The film was the third and final of Larraín’s trilogy of iconic women, after Jackie and Spencer.
Angelina Jolie Revealed What Attracted Her To Maria
During her interview with THR, Angelina Jolie shared that she was discussing Maria for the first time ever since she played the role. She shared that the subject of the film was intense. Jolie shared that there were a lot of parallels between her and Maria Callas. Jolie revealed that both of them were not comfortable with the public life.
She shared that in both her life and Callas’ life, there were things that took away the joy of their art. She cited the challenging moments in Callas’ life when people were aggressive with her as she carried a temperament that they couldn’t handle. The Maleficient actress cared about her and wanted to tell that aspect of her story. She shared:
And yet I do love to create, she does love to sing, but sometimes there are all these other things that take that joy away and change the experience of that. It was quite hard, what she went through. People were quite aggressive when she wasn’t able to be what they wanted her to be. They were very unkind, and she carried a lot of trauma and she worked very, very hard. I just began to really care about her and wanted that aspect of the story to be told.
During an interview with Vanity Fair, director Pablo Larraín shared that he wanted someone who would “naturally and organically” carry the weight and presence of Callas. He found Jolie to be the perfect fit and shared that she had a “very long, very particular, very difficult” preparation for the role.
Netflix has acquired the distribution rights of Maria in the U.S.
