Angelina Jolie on playing Maria Callas, their shared loneliness, relearning how to breathe

Angelina Jolie reflects on her portrayal of the soprano, discovering you cannot ‘fake-sing’ opera and her kids Maddox and Pax seeing her cry

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Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas in a still from Maria. Jolie says she discovered you cannot “fake-sing” opera and had to learn how to breathe again to play the role. Photo: TNS

Published: 7:15am, 2 Dec 2024Updated: 8:00am, 2 Dec 2024

Angelina Jolie never expected to hit all the notes. But finding the breath of Maria Callas was enough to bring things out of Jolie that she did not even know were in her.

“All of us, we really don’t realise where things land in our body over a lifetime of different experiences and where we hold it to protect ourselves,” Jolie said in a recent interview. “We hold it in our stomachs. We hold it in our chest. We breathe from a different place when we’re nervous or we’re sad.

“The first few weeks were the hardest because my body had to open and I had to breathe again,” she adds. “And that was a discovery of how much I wasn’t.”

In Pablo Larraín’s Maria, which Netflix released in North American cinemas ahead of the US Thanksgiving holiday before it begins streaming on December 11, Jolie gives, if not the performance of her career, then certainly of her last decade. Beginning with 2011’s In the Land of Blood and Honey, Jolie has spent recent years directing films while prioritising raising her six children.

“So my choices for quite a few years were whatever was smart financially and short. I worked very little the last eight years,” says Jolie. “And I was kind of drained. I couldn’t for a while.”