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“I don’t think this movie would exist if Angelina [Jolie] would have passed,” director Pablo Larraín has said of Maria, his latest biopic, which debuted at this year’s Venice Film Festival. And indeed, Jolie—who had not starred in a film since 2021’s Marvel project The Eternals—has become an Oscars frontrunner for her performance as the opera legend Maria Callas, who achieved spectacular fame in the mid-20th century. Maria is the third in an unofficial series of Larraín’s biopics, each exploring the rise and fall of brilliant but troubled women including Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (Jackie) and Princess Diana (Spencer). But Maria is the first of Larraín’s projects to center on a singer, and the project required Jolie to take on seven months of vocal training to imitate Callas’s iconic sound.
During a screening at AFI Fest in October, Jolie told the crowd that she had not experienced “a lot of moments in my career [when] I’m asked to give everything you’ve got, and it’s one of the greatest gifts, especially as an artist, for somebody to ask for and want you to give everything you got, that you don’t know that you’ve got.”
If Jolie were to indeed go home with an Oscar for Maria, it would be her second Academy Award after her Best Supporting Actress win in 2000 for Girl, Interrupted. To get in on the buzz, here’s what you should know about Maria.
What is Maria about?
Larraín’s film focuses largely on the final years of Callas’s life, when she was living in Paris in the 1970s and struggling with vocal decline. She died in September 1977.
Who was Maria Callas?
The woman whom the composer Leonard Bernstein referred to as “pure electricity” was born in New York in 1923, but she would become known across the world as La Divina for her divine soprano range. She is still regarded as one of the greatest operatic talents in history, though her turbulent life away from the stage has drawn similar interest: She had a strained relationship with her mother; multiple business and personal scandals; and a well-known affair with the businessman Aristole Onassis—who would later marry, lo and behold, Jacqueline Kennedy. Callas spent many of her later years in relative solitude, and she died of a heart attack at age 53.
Maria Callas greets the audience after a concert in New York’s Carnegie in 1974.
Does Jolie actually sing in Maria?
Yes, though it is not Jolie’s voice alone that you’ll hear. Larraín has explained that a hybrid mixture of Jolie’s singing and Callas’s singing create the final sound in Maria. As he told IndieWire, “In post-production, we were able to mix [Jolie’s voice] with Maria Callas’ voice. So sometimes you hear 1 percent of Angelina’s voice, sometimes it’s 5 percent, sometimes it’s 40 percent. In a couple of times—not very often, but it does happen—you listen to 60 percent or 70 percent of Angelina’s voice. Obviously, this is a movie about Maria Callas, so you wanna have Maria’s voice, but in order to make it believable, Angelina had to sing out loud in front of her crew and and hundreds of extras in order to make it possible.”
When will Maria release in theaters?
Maria will arrive in select theaters on November 27 after completing its film festival circuit.
When will Maria stream on Netflix?
Maria will stream on Netflix starting December 11, leaving plenty of time for viewers to watch ahead of the Oscars ceremony in March.
This story will be updated.
Lauren Puckett-Pope is a staff culture writer at ELLE, where she primarily covers film, television and books. She was previously an associate editor at ELLE.