Maria Callas sang for audiences all around the world, but in Maria, she’s training for her final performance — for an audience of one. The famed opera singer “was always trying to please someone, a relationship, a family member, or a friend,” director Pablo Larraín (Jackie, El Conde) told Netflix. “And now in this film, at the end of her life, she decides to do it for herself. She’s going to try to sing for herself. This is a movie about someone who is looking to find her own voice and understand her identity.”
To play an icon of the stage, Larraín turned to an icon of the silver screen: Oscar winner Angelina Jolie. Jolie leaped at the opportunity to work with Larraín. “It wasn’t just an opportunity to tell the story of Maria Callas, a woman I find interesting and care for, but really to have a director who’s going to take you on a journey and is so serious about the work and tough on you,” Jolie (a director in her own right) told Netflix.
So Larraín and Jolie set out to tell the story of Maria Callas’ final days, with the help of a cast and crew committed to making a film that lived up to Callas’ legendary talent — and her legendary life. “We’re not looking at her with pity, and I don’t think the audience [will] feel sorry for her,” Larraín said. “I think the audience will understand who she was with such a wonderful performance like Angelina has given.”
Read on for answers to all your burning questions about Maria, now streaming on Netflix.
Pablo Larraín
Did Angelina Jolie really sing in Maria?
Yes. The opera performances in the film are made up of a combination of Jolie’s voice and archival recordings of Maria Callas — which meant Jolie had to train as an opera singer. “When Pablo said, ‘Can you sing?’ I thought, ‘I mean, sure, a little,’ ” Jolie said. “But the truth is, as he said to me, ‘You have to learn how to sing opera, or I will be able to tell when we are close on your face, because it’s who she is.’ ”
The early portion of Jolie’s Callas boot camp focused on the technical skills of opera. “Angie had different stages in her preparation,” Larraín said. “At the start, it was with opera singers and coaches who helped her have the right posture, breathing, movement, and the accent. She was singing very specific operas or arias, and most of them are in Italian. You have to sing it properly and get to the right pitches, and that means being able to follow the melody and sing it properly.”
But Jolie also worked to channel the outsized emotion of the art form. “You have to give every single part of yourself,” Jolie said. “When opera singers express pain, it’s not like a little bit, it’s the biggest depth. [It requires] everything that you’ve got. It requires your full body, and it requires you to be full emotionally, as open and as loud, in as big a voice as you can possibly do.”
On set, Jolie had no safety net. Really singing looks different on camera than lip-synching does, so it was essential to capture her real physical exertions. “Angelina was absolutely exposed to singing, sometimes in front of 200 people, or 500 extras, and all people would hear was Angie’s voice alone,” Larraín recalled. In the finished film, her voice was mixed with Callas’. “There are moments in the film when you hear Maria Callas in her prime, when most of what you hear is Callas, but there’s always a fragment of Angelina,” said Larraín. “And then sometimes, it’s more Angelina than Callas. It’s a multilayered track that has different voices.”
The complex technical presentation was a comfort for Jolie. “The good news about playing Maria Callas is nobody expects you to sing Maria Callas because nobody in the world can sing Maria Callas, right?” Jolie said. “Nobody at her time could match her, and it would be a crime to not have her voice through this, because in many ways, she is very present in this film. She’s the partner in this film with me; she and I are doing this together.”
Pablo Larraín
Who is Mandrax?
Mandrax, played by Oscar nominee Kodi Smit-McPhee, is a journalist who joins Callas in Paris to interview the reclusive performer. He shares his name with a hypnotic sedative, one of the prescription drugs that Callas abused in her final days. The famed singer stopped performing operas in 1965, although at age 41, she should still have been in her prime as a singer. Instead, years of performing at a world-historical standard — as well as a scrutinized personal life and clashes with the managements of high-profile opera houses — took their toll on her health and her voice before her death in 1977 at age 53.
Did Maria Callas really meet John F. Kennedy?
Yes. In a key flashback sequence, Callas and her partner Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer) attend the famous Madison Square Garden fundraiser that saw Marilyn Monroe sing “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy. The real Maria Callas performed at the same fundraiser and briefly met Kennedy face-to-face afterward.
In Maria, Larraín imagines a further meeting, where the pair share a conversation about their lives in the spotlight. “They are wealthy,” Larraín said. “They’re famous. They have an incredible place in this world, but they can’t get away from it. The fact that they all belong to that group doesn’t make them friends, but they do belong to the same group of people. That generation of people that saw the world with privilege, but also with authenticity and will.”
It’s another piece of connective tissue to Larraín’s Jackie. Callas’ longest love affair, with businessman Aristotle Onassis, forms another of those connections: Onassis eventually went on to marry Kennedy’s widow Jacqueline, the focus of Larraín’s film Jackie. We never see Jackie in Maria, but she’s an off-screen presence. On top of that, JFK is played by Caspar Phillipson, the Danish actor who also appeared in the same role in Jackie.
“They were people who were beloved when they were alive and remain icons today,” Larraín said of the three women at the center of his films. “Maria and Jackie [and Princess Diana, subject of the director’s Spencer] were very strong women that conducted life the way that they wanted. And they had natural interactions and connections, not only through Onassis or JFK, but also mostly through the kind of world that they were living in and they related to it.”
That world is at the center of the conversation Callas shares with President Kennedy. “Maria says to JFK when they meet, ‘We are very lucky angels who belong to this very specific and fortunate group of people’ who can do anything they like,” Larraín said. Of course, there’s one thing about Callas’ world that Kennedy can’t understand — but perhaps his wife could. “It’s a world that was very masculine, and they needed to struggle to find their own space — and they did it,” Larraín said.
How does Maria end?
Throughout Maria, Callas is told in no uncertain terms that her singing career must be over, for the sake of her health. But in the film’s last moments, the sickly diva gives her final performance, a deeply felt rendition of “Vissi d’Arte” from Tosca (one of the soprano’s great roles, and the last she ever performed on an operatic stage, more than a decade earlier). Out on the street, passersby stop and hear her voice — but Maria isn’t performing for them.
“At some point, she realizes that her voice is not going to be strong enough to be able to perform at the highest level, the only level she could ever accept,” Larraín said. It’s a realization that leads Callas down the path that the film has taken her on — through memories of a time when her voice was whole.
“I wanted the experience of flashing back to not be torture for Maria but a cathartic replay,” Maria screenwriter Steven Knight explained. “She is rewinding the cassette and playing the important pieces. My idea was that as a consequence of reviewing her life in the knowledge that she is dying, Maria will ultimately be at peace and ready to go wherever it is that we all go.”
So this final performance is for the most important audience — Maria Callas herself. “Pablo and I picked up on the true fact that, shortly before she died, she was in the process of trying to rebuild her voice but without any real intention of performing for other people,” Knight said. “Perhaps she wanted to die whole, in one piece, her self and her voice reunited.”
Spent, Maria collapses on the floor of her apartment, near the piano she’s asked her butler Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) to move this way and that throughout the film. When Ferruccio and housekeeper Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher) arrive back at the flat, they’re too late — La Callas has moved on.
The film ends on a frame of Ferruccio and Bruna embracing one another: the final two people to care for Callas, caring for one another now. “These were real relationships,” Jolie said. Indeed, she adds, the real Ferruccio is still alive to this day and has never sold his story to the press. “It’s beautiful to know that she had a few people at the end of her life who really loved her,” Jolie said. “I’m so happy the film honors them because of what wonderful people they were who understood her.” Even for a figure so beloved on the world stage, that’s all anyone can really ask for.
