Not too long ago, Angelina Jolie found herself reminiscing in a tattoo shop. The buzzing of needles brought her back to the beginning of her career, when she heard warning after warning that having inked skin would limit her opportunities as an actor.
“If you work, they’ll have to cover it, and you’re making a commitment,” she recalls hearing. It was right around the time she broke through as mop-topped cyberpunk Acid Burn in Iain Softley’s 1995 thriller “Hackers.” “But also, there’s something about being an actor where often, you’re expected to become a blank slate in between characters. You almost have to keep yourself an undefined being so you can morph into different things.”
But Jolie, who’s never been one to heed warnings, saw it differently. For her, tattoos have always been something personal—vital, even—to her life as an artist. “It was one of many things I did in my life that was separate from film and being on camera—that was me and not a character,” she says. “So I wasn’t just staying a blank slate, even literally.
“To have a self is very important when a lot of your job is to transform into other selves,”
she continues.
Twenty-plus tattoos, two acting Oscar nominations (and one win, for 1999’s “Girl, Interrupted”), and nearly $6 billion at the box office later, that distinction between the personal and professional remains as important as ever. That’s especially true now as she embarks on a comeback tour for her leading turn in Pablo Larraín’s “Maria,” in which she plays culture-shifting opera singer Maria Callas at the very end of her life.
The Netflix drama—which earned Jolie an eight-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival, as well as Golden Globe and Critics’ Choice nominations—marks the actor’s first major role in three years. “Maria” is the first project since Clint Eastwood’s 2008 drama “Changeling” to put her under the bright lights of an awards season press run. (In December, she made her first late-night appearance in a decade on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.”)
“I’m dipping in and out of it,” she says with a smile, referring to the recent whirlwind of red carpet appearances and interviews. “I’ve always approached it that way. You just do a few [events], then you go home and don’t let it become too central in your life. Focus on the art. It’s very important not to take it all too seriously and let it consume your days or your work.”
The work, for Jolie, is the most personal aspect of all. She apologizes, charmingly, several times throughout our conversation for not having the words to describe what she does before and after the director calls action. It’s instinct; it’s unplanned. Although she does have a formal background in Lee Strasberg’s Method, which calls on sense memory to create lived-in performances, Jolie prefers to take a more indefinable approach.
“For me, acting is not as much about requiring a skill to do a job than it is about becoming a more in-tune, sensitive human being—to study human behavior and work in community with other creative people,” she explains. “That creative life stems from real life, not so much a class that you can take.”
“For me, acting is not as much about requiring a skill to do a job than it is about becoming a more in-tune, sensitive human being.”
Jolie returns to that phrase often—“the creative life.” For her, what you’re drawn to as a person informs who you become onscreen. “A lot of artists are just very emotionally sensitive people who have a need to communicate with others,” she says. “You feel like you have to ask that question about life or death or grief or madness. You want to understand something about life or yourself or other people. Often, it’s a messier life than can be quantified. Acting is, I think, about staying a bit raw as a person and being able to let these things come through you.”
That’s why “Maria” presented such a challenge—and the reason her performance is so remarkable. “More than any role I’ve ever done, this required balancing the technical and the emotional,” Jolie says.
At the height of her fame in the 1940s and ’50s, Callas was a force of nature in the opera world. She was a larger-than-life soprano who almost single-handedly revitalized the public’s interest in the classic bel canto style through the sheer power of her voice and stage presence.
Nevertheless, hounded by the press for her reputedly volatile temper and accusations of a vocal decline beginning in the late 1950s, the one-time prima donna lived out her last days largely alone. Jolie related to the idea of an immensely talented woman who’s gradually worn down by relentless media scrutiny. She absolutely did not, however, relate to being a world-class opera singer.
To get to that place, Jolie spent seven months training with vocal coach Eric Vetro, the musical mastermind who also worked with Timothée Chalamet on “A Complete Unknown” and Ariana Grande on “Wicked.” “In my first singing class, I just started crying,” Jolie recalls. “Eric said, ‘Take a deep, deep breath, let everything relax, and let a full sound come out.’ ”
She soon discovered that the line between the technical and the emotional wasn’t as wide as she thought. “Emotions flooded forward, because I think we all hold so much in our bodies, in so many places,” she says. “I would start to sing, and for me, everything was new. When I discovered I was a soprano, I was shocked. When I first hit a high note, I was stunned and just staring at the coach.”
Jolie wasn’t just learning from Vetro, but from Callas herself. The singer left behind hundreds of recordings—full performances, arias, even a series of master classes she conducted at Juilliard between 1971 and 1972. Over dozens of listening sessions alone in the dark, Callas taught Jolie how to be Callas.
“When I meet somebody who’s connected with a film I’ve made, I feel less alone in this world.”
“This required something that I was completely unfamiliar with,” the actor says. “And I found I couldn’t have done it had I not taken [Callas’] advice to learn the basics, learn your Italian, and learn the music. Force yourself to not think about it emotionally or personalize it; just do the technical work so precisely that when you are there, you can do that part without thinking.”
“Maria” was Jolie’s introduction to playing a fellow artist, an experience that led her to explore her feelings about her own craft and everything that comes with it. “The film itself is the study of an artist, of somebody who lived and actually struggled in a very big way as an artist,” Jolie says. “She was a great artist, but she was absolutely not loved for who she was offstage, and she died feeling very attacked and very alone. She did something exceptional, but the process of doing it wasn’t always a pleasure.”
While filming “Maria,” the actor experienced one surreal episode after another. During one
quiet moment, Jolie found herself sitting in the dressing room of Milan’s historic Teatro alla Scala dressed as the tragic heroine of Gaetano Donizetti’s “Anna Bolena.”
“The craziest part wasn’t even being onstage, because onstage, you kind of leave your body when something is so beyond you,” Jolie says. “It was warming up in that dressing room, knowing I had to go downstairs and sing on that stage in front of the people that work at La Scala who are used to hearing the most wonderful sounds in the world.”
Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas in Maria. Cr. Pablo Larraín/Netflix
All of it—the preparation, the performances, the unreality—culminated in the film’s final scene; it was a fitting metaphor for that mixture of skill and pure feeling. On Sept. 16, 1977, the day of Callas’ death from a heart attack, she sang one final time: a roaring rendition of “Vissi d’arte” from Giacomo Puccini’s “Tosca” that was loud enough to be heard on the Paris streets below. “It’s funny—well, maybe not funny—but I realized that I couldn’t sing and cry at the same time,” Jolie remembers.
“The whole thing of singing opera is that you have to relax your throat and body, then push your muscles and get the sound through that way,” she continues. “And when you cry, all those same muscles tighten and shut down.”
As she pressed warm water bottles against her throat, Jolie realized that both the sentiment and the singing needed to come from somewhere deeper and less cerebral: “You know those times when you cry and the tears are streaming down your face, but you’re not tense?” The breakthrough came when she understood that the struggle was the point—that in this era of her life, Callas was trying to match an idealized version of herself. So Jolie feeling like her voice wasn’t enough was exactly what the scene needed.
“It was very strange,” she says. “It was just beyond my skill level, and something I was having to really catch up to—which felt right for Maria, because she is who she is. I was often in her shadow and just trying to catch up.”
Jolie left “Maria” with an immense sense of gratitude. “I’m very conscious of how fortunate I am,” she says. “I’ve always loved [acting]; I’ve always approached it the same way. But now I’m even more grateful to have a chance to live as an artist and work with other artists. What a privilege to be able to play with others, to share emotion. [When I was filming] ‘Maria,’ I was almost 50, and I was sitting with teachers teaching me a skill I never thought I’d learn. To find your voice and to sing—what a gift it is, and how beautiful to communicate that with an audience. When I meet somebody who’s connected with a film I’ve made, I feel less alone in this world.”
The pursuit of creating genuine connections is what keeps pushing Jolie into new creative territory. Last year, she earned her first Tony Award as a producer of best musical winner “The Outsiders.” She also returned to the director’s chair after seven years to film the 2024 war drama “Without Blood,” starring Salma Hayek. And she continued her decades of humanitarian work, taking a trip to Northeast Africa last September to meet refugees displaced by the ongoing civil war in Sudan.
Jolie believes that art—especially global art—is “such an amazing way to learn about each other. What is it to be human? It’s the beauty of what we do. The worst is when things are about being divided or different or competitive, or it’s just not about the sharing. It really ruins such a special thing.”
As for her next steps on camera, she’s currently filming Alice Winocour’s “Stitches,” a drama set in the Paris fashion world. And after that? “Maria” has given her a taste for trying new things. Recently, she told Deadline that she wanted to try a straight-up comedy role, a genre she’s gotten close to with projects like “Maleficent” but has never fully embraced.
“There’s a responsibility to the audience,” she says. “There’s a part of me as an artist, of course, that wants to explore every different type of storytelling medium for myself. But I’m also very conscious of where I seem to connect and where maybe somebody else would be better. For comedy, I’m not sure I could entertain an audience and make them laugh and be what they need me to be. It’s [about] the exchange—it’s less about what I want to do and more [about] where an audience feels you’re effective.”
These are perfectly valid points; but I posit that she likely felt the same about singing before undergoing seven months of intensive training to channel one of the most influential opera performers of all time. Jolie considers this for a second, then tells me, “You know, I’ve never done ‘Saturday Night Live.’ I’ve always been curious, but I’ve never been asked.”
That immediate pivot—that instant spark at the prospect of a new challenge—reveals more about who Jolie is as an artist than anything she could put into words. It’s a curiosity and a resistance to being told what’s possible that’s as permanent as the ink on her skin.
“Well,” she says as if she’s just decided something, “challenge accepted.”
This story originally appeared in the Feb. 13 issue of Backstage Magazine. To hear our full conversation with Jolie, listen and subscribe to In the Envelope: The Actor's Podcast.
Photographed by Victoria Will at the Carlye Hotel on 11/12. Dress by Gabriella Hearst.Earrings and Ring by Erede. Hair by Massimo Serini. Makeup by Romy Soleimani. Styling was done by Angelina's own. Cover designed by Andy Turnbull.