We Took Angelina Jolie to the Opera. She Found ‘a Poetry to It All.’
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Jolie plays the superstar soprano Maria Callas in the new movie “Maria.” We went to the Metropolitan Opera with her and the director Pablo Larraín.
By Javier C. HernándezPhotographs and Video by Sasha Arutyunova
Dec. 1, 2024
Updated 1:25 p.m. ET
The Metropolitan Opera House was awash in pearls and tuxedos on a recent gala evening. Socialites traded political gossip by the bar, and bankers discussed coming vacations in the Maldives.
Then a golden elevator door slid open and a glamorous figure slipped out.
Heads turned, cellphones clumsily emerged and people began to talk. Is that really her? What is she doing here? She seems taller in person. Look at those tattoos!
I had invited Angelina Jolie to the Met to see a performance of Puccini’s “Tosca” ahead of the release of “Maria,” a new film starring Jolie as opera’s defining diva, Maria Callas.
Jolie is one of the most recognizable people on the planet, commanding attention wherever she goes. But her night at the opera got off to a bumpy start. She had a problem with her dress, a black, floor-length Yves Saint Laurent with a velvet cape. (The seamstresses in the Met’s costume shop were summoned, but Jolie soldiered on without help.) And when I met her in the foyer, she seemed to be having last-minute doubts about me shadowing her, saying it might spoil the experience.
“I just want to enjoy the evening,” she told me. “I want to take it all in.”
Jolie, 49, an actress, director and humanitarian, is one of Hollywood’s most powerful and scrutinized figures. Her every move is tracked by the tabloids. (“Angelina Jolie, the blonde bombshell, puts on brave face,” a recent headline said.) Her divorce from Brad Pitt in 2016 is still playing out in court, and their six children have become fodder for the media.
Yet Jolie remains an enigma, a mystery even to those who work with her, carefully crafting her words and image.
“I worked with her for a very long time,” said Pablo Larraín, the director of “Maria,” who joined us for the performance of “Tosca.” “And I still have no idea who she is.”
In Callas, one of the greatest singers of the 20th century and an enduring cultural star, Jolie said she had found a kindred spirit. Called La Divina, Callas, too, was exalted and scorned by critics and fans. Her personal life was examined, interrogated and written about. (She had a long relationship with the shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis.) And she, too, was described as intense and elusive. Callas died in 1977, at 53, with only her housekeeper and butler nearby.
Jolie told me she identified with Callas’s isolation. “Loneliness is not a bad thing,” she said.
“We’re both seen as strong, but actually we’re very vulnerable and human,” she added. “I don’t think either one of us is necessarily comfortable being public.”
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A slightly blurry photo of Angelina Jolie in her box at the Metropolitan Opera. She is smiling. We see the half-face of the director Pablo Larraín on the right side of the frame.
Jolie on learning to sing: “To find my voice and my breath, I had to drop all the things that were protecting me and open up again.”
“Maria,” which opened this week in select theaters and goes to Netflix on Dec. 11, is Jolie’s return to the screen after a three-year hiatus. The film has already prompted Oscar chatter around her performance, though she says her aim was to be true to Callas and to produce something that would please opera fans. (She won the supporting actress Academy Award in 2000 for her portrayal of a psychiatric patient in “Girl, Interrupted.”)
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To play Callas, Jolie took voice lessons for seven months; learned arias by Puccini, Verdi, Donizetti and Bellini; and studied clips of Callas on YouTube, mastering her smile, her posture, the way she moved her hands, her peculiar way of speaking. While Jolie’s singing voice is rarely audible in the film — it was blended to varying degrees with Callas’s — she grew confident enough to sing before large crowds of extras, at one point filming on the hallowed stage of Teatro alla Scala in Milan for four hours.
That evening at the Met, Jolie kept a distance from the crowd. She descended a grand staircase with the air of a goddess coming to Earth, finding her way to a seat in Box 19, next to Larraín.
“There’s an authenticity here that is beautiful,” she said. “There’s a poetry to it all.”
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LARRAÍN, 48, GREW UP in Santiago, Chile, immersed in opera. His mother worshiped Callas and played her cassettes in the car.
“I had this ghost of grandiose performance in my head,” he said. “She was a mythical figure.”
As Larraín considered options for the final installment in his trilogy imagining the interior lives of prominent 20th-century women, Callas beckoned. “Jackie” (2016) starred Natalie Portman as Jacqueline Kennedy (who, as it happened, would later go on to marry Onassis, leaving Callas bereft); and in “Spencer” (2021), Kristen Stewart played Princess Diana.
For Callas, Larraín wanted an actress who could create “our Maria,” he said — not simply imitate her. He called Jolie, who had reached out after seeing his earlier work.
“If there’s truth, beauty, emotion, vulnerability and fragility, then you have a character,” he said. “And if you have a character, then you have a movie.”
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Working with the screenwriter Steven Knight, Larraín turned the focus to the final days of the singer’s life. In “Maria,” Callas struggles to stage a comeback as she faces the reality of a damaged voice. The film portrays her strained romance with Onassis (Haluk Bilginer); her addiction to sedatives; and her difficult childhood (born in New York to Greek immigrants, she moved to Greece with her mother and sister in 1937, when she was 13).
Larraín picked music that he loved and felt would connect to the real-life drama of Callas’s life. “This movie is about someone who became the tragedies that she played onstage,” he said.
at the film’s start. The melancholy
“Opera,” he said, “is a state of grace.”
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In a white hallway at the Met with red carpet, Jolie looks at a portrait of Maria Callas. Larraín looks at Jolie.
Diva on diva: “They really got her hands,” Jolie said of Callas’s portrait. “I love that.”
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Two women backstage: The soprano Lise Davisdsen and Jolie. They face each other. Davidsen smiles; Jolie has her hands clasped.
The soprano Lise Davidsen, who sang the title role in “Tosca,” with Jolie. “You were just transcendent,” Jolie told her.
WHEN JOLIE FOUND OUT that learning to sing opera would be a requirement to play Callas, she panicked. (“You can’t cheat,” Larraín told her.) For years, she had carried the trauma of a boyfriend telling her she had a bad voice and that she should be grateful she had other talents.
“It was nasty, and it was more than once,” she said. “Then I stopped singing.”
She told Larraín that she had “a lot of emotion and pain that I did not feel like letting go.” She was not very familiar with classical music; she had grown up listening to punk bands like the Clash. And she wasn’t sure she had the technique to sing — until that point, she had avoided even “Happy Birthday.”
Larraín brought in the vocal coach Eric Vetro, who started with breathing and posture exercises and helped Jolie stretch her range and resonance. Jolie thought she had a low voice. But it turned out that, like Callas, she was a soprano.
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At her first lesson she cried, overwhelmed by the emotional and physical challenges.
“To find my voice and my breath,” she said, “I had to drop all the things that were protecting me and open up again.”
She gradually learned her first aria — familiar to movie fans from the soundtrack of “A Room With a View” — with Callas’s recordings as her lodestar. She listened to Callas’s master classes, gleaning tips on vocal technique. And she studied Italian.
After about three months, Vetro noticed something remarkable: Jolie’s mouth was beginning to move like Callas’s — and she had developed a captivating presence as a singer.
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The director and actress on the grand “Tosca” set at the Met. You can see the swirl of the painted backdrop and the towering architecture of Castel Sant’Angelo.
On the “Tosca” set at the Met.
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Two men hug backstage; one has a patterned shirt, the other is dressed in a tux and holds a baton.
Music men: Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, with Larraín.
“I looked at her and said, ‘This is going to work,’” Vetro said. “The emotion was coming through her eyes, through her hands and through her voice.”
In the early days of production at a theater in Greece, Jolie was asked to sing on camera for the first time. It was the opening scene of “Maria,” in which she looks directly into the camera and sings “Ave Maria.” She allowed only a few people in the theater, including Larraín and her sons Maddox and Pax, who worked on the film.
Through an earpiece, Jolie listened to Callas; a vocal coach, the soprano Lori Stinson, gestured and mouthed the libretto in the background. Larraín, behind the camera, heard a live mix of Callas and Jolie.
Jolie was dispirited after her first attempt. They did six more takes.
“Something extraordinarily human and truthful was happening,” Larraín said. “I saw someone who was transforming herself.”
With her first aria done, Jolie grew more confident on set as she moved through bel canto classics from operas like Bellini’s “Norma” and “I Puritani.” Stinson, who worked with Jolie on location, sometimes pushed her fist into Jolie’s ribs to get her to open up her body and her mouth.
In the film, Callas’s voice is dominant. But there are hints of Jolie’s in some scenes. A rehearsal of “Anna Bolena” near the end, when Callas’s voice is in decline, is at certain moments about 60 percent Jolie, according to Larraín.
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For Jolie, the biggest test came in singing “Piangete voi?” from “Anna Bolena” at La Scala, a temple to opera where Callas rose to fame, appearing in more than two dozen productions. The aria was one of the most challenging on the list, but it was also Jolie’s favorite. Dressed in a costume that matched Callas’s, with a white headpiece and navy dress, she sang before a crowd of about 500 people.
“It’s like jumping off a cliff,” she said. “There was just nothing I could do but try to give everything I had.”
Singing became therapeutic for Jolie. “It’s very primal to let sound out,” she said. “We lock so much sadness and heaviness into our voices.”
It also reconnected her with the memory of her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, who sang Rolling Stones hits to Jolie when she was young. Her mother’s death from cancer in 2007, at 56, made Jolie feel she no longer had the luxury of time.
“I don’t want to be comfortable or too relaxed,” she said. “I want to live fully.”
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Larraín and Jolie seen from behind in their opera box. The glittering theater is visible beyond them.
Singing became therapeutic for Jolie. “It’s very primal to let sound out,” she said. “We lock so much sadness and heaviness into our voices.”
ON A WINDY AUTUMN morning, the day of the “Tosca” performance at the Met, I met Jolie in a heavily perfumed suite at the Carlyle hotel, a few blocks from Central Park. She sat with perfect posture, sipping on a peppermint tea.
“This is the most fun I’ve ever had doing press,” she said. “I love the opera, so I’m excited for tonight.”
Larraín had suggested, without offering specifics, that I ask her about “the bull story.” But when I broached the subject, she seemed caught off guard.
“I don’t know if I can share that,” she said. She eventually offered a few details, saying that she had been upset by a bullfight she witnessed when young, and that she often thought about that bull, “this beautiful animal,” in preparing to play Callas.
“It was a big moment in my life — it was something that kind of shaped me, that then I’ve carried,” she said. She stopped herself, saying she would think more about what she wanted to share.
I asked her about the bull again that evening, during an intermission at “Tosca,” saying that it seemed to have deep meaning for her and that the public cared about what informed her artistry. She laughed.
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“I’m not telling you,” she said. “I’m not talking about it.”
Was the bull a victim? “No.” A symbol of resilience? “It’s more complicated than that.”
“The bull was the only way I could describe who Maria was to me, to Pablo,” she said, looking at Larraín. “You’re going to have to let this be our little secret. It’s a language between us.”
I had begun to feel a bit like Mandrax, the television interviewer in “Maria” who hounds Callas throughout the film with intrusive questions about her life and career. (Played by Kodi Smit-McPhee, he is named after the pills Callas is taking.)
Larraín said that Jolie, like Callas, knew when to let people in and when to push them out.
“She opens the gate for you to understand and feel what she’s feeling,” he said. “And then, out of nowhere, she’s out. And you cannot enter again. And then you wonder.”
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Jolie and Larraín in their box at “Tosca” seen from another angle.
Jolie and Larraín at “Tosca.” The title role was a signature one for Callas.
I HAD BEEN WARNED before our interview that Jolie did not wish to discuss her personal life.
She and Pitt, with whom she had a romantic partnership for more than a decade, are still wrangling in court, a saga that has been described as the “world’s longest divorce” and that continues to draw attention on gossip sites. Jolie has accused Pitt of “physical and emotional abuse of her and their children” aboard a private jet in 2016. (Pitt has denied the accusations.) The two are now arguing over the matter of Château Miraval, a winery they owned jointly in France.
During intermission at the Met, when we were alone in the box, I asked Jolie what it was like to be her in this moment. “I’m feeling a little uncomfortable being so public again,” she said, adding that she preferred the security of hiding inside characters.
She had described her time away from acting as a period of discovery and confrontation with herself. What had she learned?
She broke eye contact and struggled to offer a reply, saying she was concerned about revealing too many truths.
“When you are stripped of so many things that make you feel safe and whole, you really sit with what matters to you and what you want to give every breath in your body for,” she said. “In the end, I found a lot of softness.”
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Jolie has said she was dismayed to learn that an artist of Callas’s caliber was asked in interviews about her personal life, including her relationship with Onassis, who married Jackie Kennedy in 1968.
Jolie was particularly bothered by a “60 Minutes” interview that aired in 1974. Mike Wallace asks Callas at one point, “You mean you’re a man-eater?”
At intermission, in between bites of Kind bars, Jolie said she was moved by Callas’s determination in the face of struggles with journalists, impresarios, critics, family and friends. She said she hoped that despite all that, Callas was able to “feel safe to be soft and hopefully eventually rediscover a level of joy.”
Had Jolie found joy again?
“I don’t know about that,” she said. “But I hope for it. I hope to find a lightness that I may have lost along the way.”
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Jolie and Larrain sit on the lip of the stage and gaze out at the empty auditorium.
WHEN THE FINAL CURTAIN came down on “Tosca,” around 10 p.m., Jolie smiled and stood up to applaud. She and Larraín, both raised as Catholics, had enjoyed dissecting the staging’s religious imagery. Jolie said she had become fond of the phrase “Tosca’s kiss,” a line uttered by Floria Tosca, the title character, before she kills the police chief Scarpia. And she and Larraín were excited to see children in the audience, a sign, they said, of the wide appeal of opera.
Jolie said she had been particularly affected in the second act, when Tosca sings “Vissi d’arte”:
I lived for art, I lived for love/I never harmed a living soul.
Jolie knows the aria well: She sings it in the final scenes of “Maria,” as an anguished Callas, at home in a nightgown, prepares to die.
“There’s a heaviness,” Jolie said, “and there’s a real beauty.”
In a dressing room backstage, she and Larraín greeted the Met’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and Lise Davidsen, the renowned soprano who sang the title role in “Tosca.”
Nézet-Séguin gave his baton to Larraín. Davidsen, one of the few true opera stars today, praised Jolie. “You actually sing!” she said.
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Jolie smiled and clasped her hands.
“You were just transcendent,” Jolie told Davidsen. “I don’t do what you do.”
On her way out, Jolie stopped to admire a portrait of Callas, who performed only 21 times at the Met, including a final run of “Tosca” with the company in 1965. She asked for a private moment.
“They really got her hands,” she said. “I love that.”
Then she made an impromptu visit to the stage. After a few minutes inspecting the sets and staring into the harsh lights of an empty auditorium, Jolie headed for the exit.
“Very moving,” she said.
Outside, a paparazzo waited near her black Chevrolet, preparing to pounce.
“Smile, Angelina!” he said. “Smile!”
Jolie obliged. Then she got into the car and headed into the Manhattan night.
Video by Sasha Arutyunova; Additional camera operator: Reagan Petrehn
Audio credits: Warner Classics (“Maria” Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Javier C. Hernández reports on classical music, opera and dance in New York City and beyond. More about Javier C. Hernández
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