Angelina Jolie took on one of the most challenging roles of her career in Netflix‘s new biopic Maria, which documents the life of famed opera singer Maria Callas.
Of course, being a film about a singer, one of the most important aspects of the role was the vocal performance. Jolie is seen singing throughout the movie, and fans have been wondering whether the Oscar-winning actress actually sang for real or whether she was lip-syncing.
It turns out to be a bit of both, with Jolie’s voice mixed with Callas’ vocals. Director Pablo Larraín told IndieWire that Jolie’s singing was mixed with Callas’ voice in post-production, “So sometimes you hear 1 percent of Angelina’s voice, sometimes it’s 5 percent, sometimes it’s forty percent, in a couple of times, not very often, but it does happen, you listen to sixty percent or seventy percent of Angelina’s voice.”
“Obviously, this is a movie about Maria Callas, so you wanna have Maria’s voice,” he continued. “But in order to make it believable, Angelina had to sing out loud in front of her crew and hundreds of extras in order to make it possible.”
Jolie herself opened up about the role in an interview with Variety, where she explained how she took singing and vocal lessons for the project.
“I walked into a room with the piano, and somebody said, ‘Ok, let’s see where you’re at.’ And I got really emotional. I took a big deep breath, and I let out a sound, and I started crying,” she shared. “I think we all don’t realize how much we hold inside our bodies, and how much we carry and how much that affects our sound and our voice and our ability to make sound.”
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“I’ve been holding a lot for a long time, and that beginning and that sound, and then when that sound would eventually come, it was the best therapy I’ve ever had,” Jolie continued. “Honestly, I think I would tell a lot of people before you try therapy and spend too much time there, go to singing class.”
Larraín praised Jolie’s dedication, telling IndieWire, “She had to train for a long time. She trained for over seven months. There’s breathing, there’s posture, there’s accent. She sang in Italian and French, but mostly Italian. There’s, you know, what in music is called the pitch, which is the capacity to reach each note and follow the melody, and that was very challenging for her.”
He added that Jolie did “beautiful, beautiful work” and made the movie “believable.”
“Without that, none of this could happen,” Larraín stated. “Even if you have a great performance and everything is beautiful, if you don’t believe that she’s actually singing, there’s no movie, and I think she pulled it off. We had the help of a number of people that are experts on it and so I’m happy that it actually works.”
Maria, Streaming, Netflix
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