Everything to know about Angelina Jolie’s latest film, 'Maria'

This fall, Angelina Jolie will finally return to our screens.

Teaming up with director Pablo Larraín, Jolie takes on the role of real-life 20th-century opera legend Maria Callas in Maria, a psychological drama that reimagines the famed Greek-American soprano’s final days before her death in 1977.

Ahead, we track everything to know about the movie.

Angelina Jolie plays Maria Callas, one of the most renowned opera singers of the 20th century.

Callas was perhaps the most acclaimed opera singer of her time. Her life was full of moments as turbulent as they were glamorous, marred by her troublesome relationship with her mother, public scandals that labelled her as a diva, and a clandestine affair with one of the richest men in the world. Toward the end of her life, she spent years away from the stage and living as a recluse in Paris. Callas died of a heart attack in her Paris apartment on September 16, 1977. She was 53.

The movie marks Jolie’s first return to acting after a years-long hiatus from Hollywood. (She last starred in Marvel’s 2021 superhero film Eternals.) In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Jolie described her connection to the opera singer.

“I’m sure there’s a lot that will be read into it of our overlaps as women, but the one that’s maybe not the most obvious is I’m not sure how comfortable we both are with being public. And there was a pressure behind the working that wasn’t just the joy of the work,” she told the outlet. “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.”

The movie will be released through Netflix.

After premiering at the Venice Film Festival this past August, Maria will head next to select theatres starting on November 27. The film will later drop on Netflix on December 11.

The trailer offers a glimpse of her transformation into Maria.

The first full-length trailer, which dropped on October 24, shows Jolie’s moving portrayal of the complicated singer.

When asked how it feels to be on stage, Jolie—as Callas—describes, “An exaltation. An intoxication. I thought the stage itself would burn.” She adds later, “There is no life away from the stage.”

Pablo Larraín directed the movie.

Larraín’s Maria is the third installment of his so-called “Great Woman trilogy,” which also includes meditations on the lives of Jackie Kennedy in Jackie (2016) and Princess Diana in Spencer (2021). The leading ladies of both films—Natalie Portman and Kristen Stewart, respectively—earned Oscar nominations for Best Actress, leading many critics to speculate that Jolie’s performance in Maria has naturally put her in the running for next year’s award circuit.

Does Angelina actually sing in the movie?

The film uses a blend of Jolie’s voice and recordings of Callas singing.

As Larraín explained in an interview with IndieWire: “(Jolie) had different trainers. The first one was posture, breathing and accent, being able to properly sing mostly in Italian. And the second is the singing itself. That is about pitch. ... Angie had to wear an earpiece on the set and sing it out loud. And there was no other sound in there but her voice.”

He continued, “We not only have her voice, but we have breathing, every sound that comes out of Angie’s physicality is captured in the mix. So sometimes you hear most of it is Callas, as it should be in a movie about Maria Callas, when she’s singing well, right? And then in the present of the film, there’s more of Angie. Sometimes it’s 5 percent, sometimes 50, sometimes 70.”

Lead image credit: Getty Images 

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