Angelina Jolie is set to make a triumphant return to the silver screen this winter. Three years since her last film, Marvel’s Eternals, the star is back to play one of opera’s most revered figures.
Teaming up with director Pablo Larraín, who was behind 2016 biopic Jackie and 2021’s Spencer, Jolie takes on the role of real-life 20th-century opera singer 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.
When is Maria’s release date?
The widely anticipated film is set to be released in UK cinemas on 10 January 2025. That’s considerably later than for those over in the States; the film is set to be released in limited theatres in America on 27 November, before transferring to Netflix on 11 December.
The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival earlier this year and was critically acclaimed, receiving an eight-minute standing ovation.
What is Maria about?
As previously stated, the eponymous film will focus on Maria Callas, widely considered to be 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 saw her 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, before she suddenly died of a heart attack in her apartment on 16 September, 1977. She was 53.
The movie marks Jolie’s first return to acting after a hiatus from Hollywood. 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.”
Is there a trailer for 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.”
Who directed Maria?
Pablo 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 Jolie 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 five percent, sometimes 50, sometimes 70.”
