Angelina Jolie: "Maria Callas was a punk"

Angelina Jolie is one of the most famous women in the world; an actress who is arguably as well known for her relationship with the equally famous Brad Pitt as her own work.

These outward parallels are not, however, what led Jolie to portray the opera diva in Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s latest film, Maria.

“It was a challenge,” the 49-year-old says when I ask why she wanted to take on the role. “As artists you want to take on something that you are afraid of, that you’re not sure you can do.” It was also the opportunity to work with Larraín that ultimately convinced her to take on that challenge. “My first step in was Pablo,” she says. “I’ve always wanted to work with him.”

Larraín has already made two dramas about famous 20th-century women: 2016’s Jackie (about Jackie Kennedy) and 2021’s Spencer (about Diana, Princess of Wales and written, like Maria, by Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight).

“Callas achieved such a level of beauty and perfection in what she did,” he says. “She changed opera and had a big influence in the history of fashion and yet really we know very little about her.”

In past interviews, Larraín has said that the reason he believed Jolie was right for the role was that she and Callas both had a sense of mystery about them. But surely even those of us not obsessed with the minutiae of celebrity culture know plenty about Jolie.

Wild child daughter of Jon Voight, she married Billy Bob Thornton and the couple wore each other’s blood in lockets around their necks. She then married Brad Pitt and they later divorced, leading to an acrimonious battle over custody of their six kids. She had a preventive double mastectomy after finding out she was at risk of breast cancer, and she is involved in refugee rights and humanitarianism. I know more about Jolie than is healthy or normal. So where is this mystery?

“You don’t know me,” insists Jolie. “You think you know her because you might have seen her in movies, in newspapers, social media,” adds Larraín, “but one thing is the perception you might have, and the other is the reality. Angelina is very mysterious and the more known she is, the more there’s an element of mystery.”

Jolie spent months learning to sing opera to play Maria Callas. In the film, her voice is mixed with Callas’s own, and the marketing campaign for Maria has stressed the intensity of the training she did – but why bother, when she could have just lip-synced. Was it, I ask cynically, because she was less likely to get any award nominations if she had not sung for real? She says not. “You really can’t fake opera. It doesn’t work. It has to be like a full-body thing for it to happen.”

So, having learnt how to sing opera, does she now perform Ave Maria doing the dishes? Jolie smiles. “The thing with opera is you have to sing it pretty loud. I’ve had my moments when everybody’s gone out, because then I get to be loud.”

Maria is set in 1977, the final year of Callas’s life but also the year that the Sex Pistols released God Save the Queen and the Clash their debut album. Jolie was born two years earlier in LA, and growing up her musical tastes tended more towards the sounds of Lydon and Strummer than Caruso and Callas.

Still, while the jagged fury of punk might seem far from the heightened drama of opera, for Jolie, the Clash and Callas had more in common than might be suspected. “Today, so much is about what is popular and what hits the algorithm,” she argues. “Punk was the opposite. It was defiance against what was shoved down your throat and what everybody liked and what was normal. Punk wasn’t complacency or following. So I think in her own way Maria Callas was a punk.”

In person, Jolie occasionally shows flashes of unexpected rawness and honesty. She says that learning to sing opera forced her to “go to certain places that are not comfortable. I was not sure I was ready to visit that level of truth and pain”. She does this often – saying things about this role that could be seen as subtle references to her own life. “I can see her love of her work, but I can see also that there was a level of pressure and pain,” she says at another point about Callas, but maybe not only about her. “She was never free from it [the pressure and pain] because it wasn’t just associated with her creativity.”

She adds, tellingly, that she found singing opera to be a form of therapy. “I would recommend it for anybody. When people go through things in their life it stores in their body. It gets in your stomach and your posture changes – but to sing opera you have to unlock all those parts. I became very emotional because when you start to let it out it’s very, very primal.”

In preparation for meeting Jolie, I had watched footage of Callas being interviewed by Mike Wallace on American TV in 1974. The interview is confrontational and Wallace asks Callas questions about the quality of her singing voice and her relationship history that I can’t imagine any of today’s stars being asked. So, as I end my conversation with her and Larraín, I have to ask – does she feel like today’s celebrities are overly protected when it comes to interviews?

“I don’t know if it’s protected, or if it’s turned into something cheaper,” she says. “When you think about the old interviews there was a fuller conversation that was able to be had. I watched Callas’s really old interviews and they spent hours talking to her about her craft. Nobody’s ever done that for me. She was taken seriously.”

Of course, Jolie is now taken seriously as a human rights campaigner – but perhaps her commitment to playing Maria Callas, to singing for real, and exploring dark corners of her own life to do that, could be seen as a demand to be taken seriously for her art as much as any activism.

“I haven’t allowed myself to just enjoy [being an artist], because things become about celebrity or business,” she says. “It is a gift to be allowed to live a life as an artist, and this role has helped make me rediscover art and being an artist. I am rediscovering that through Maria.”

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Maria is in UK cinemas from Friday 10th January 2025.

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