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Angelina Jolie has a real knack for portraying real people. Jolie’s best movies such as Girl, Interrupted, Gia, and Changeling drew the eyes of critics and audiences, receiving multiple nominations and accolades. Jolie’s 2024 Netflix movie Maria seems to be held in high regard before its streaming release with director Barry Jenkins comparing it to Denzel Washington’s Malcolm X. With a compliment like that, I’m even more pumped to add the upcoming biopic to my watchlist.
There’s just something about watching a Netflix biopic that’s so epic. Whether it’s the catchy musical biopic Tick, Tick…Boom! or the Barack and Michelle Obama-produced film Rustin, the streaming service honors these real-life individuals by showcasing the extraordinary lives they lived. Angelina Jolie’s Maria doesn’t seem too far off from Netflix’s excellent biopic streak portraying the final years of opera singer Maria Callas’ life.
At a post-screen AFI Fest conversation moderated by Barry Jenkins (via IndieWire), the American filmmaker told Jolie he loved her movie so much that he compared it to a Denzel Washington classic. Now, that makes me want to see the upcoming music biopic even more:
The performance is so striking. It’s almost like, to me, Jesse Eisenberg is Mark Zuckerberg. Denzel Washington is Malcolm X, in a certain way. And I think you are Maria Callas in the same way. In this movie, in so many moments, you are performing with your whole body.
Barry Jenkins makes an excellent point in that you know someone is talented when they lose themselves in their roles. You no longer see the actor but the real-life person they’re portraying.
That’s how it felt when I first saw the amazing must-watch biopic Malcolm X where I felt like I was seeing the human rights activist right before me. I saw Denzel Washington put strength, charisma, and emotional range that made Malcolm X relatable for audiences. It felt the same for me seeing David Oyelowo playing Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma where it was like the American minister came back to life on the big screen. If Angelina Jolie did the same thing for Maria Callas and told her story with justice, this makes me all the more excited to learn about the final years of the famed opera singer.
Angelina Jolie has done an excellent job absorbing the real-life roles of Lisa Rowe in Girl, Interrupted where she won her first Oscar, and Christine Collins in Changeling looking for her missing son. It looks like for Jolie’s next biopic, she really dedicated herself to her new role and explained what her secret was to fully immersing herself as Maria Callas:
I didn’t know how to approach this, and so I listened to her. Maria taught acting, she taught opera, she taught voice. There are so many tapes of her, and she said her process…she calls it straitjacketing. You listen to the piece from the composer as intended, exactly as intended, and you don’t put your emotion in it, your thoughts, your anything. You just have the discipline of learning it with the sound, the pitch, the breath, Italian, the words, everything with that discipline. That was the key to her and who she was. Then, only in the final hour do you bring your emotional self, and by that point, you’re so locked in technically that you can now give the space for your full emotional self and your body, and it works together. I don’t know if I ever understood that fully as an artist until I learned that from her.
With the teachings of Maria Callas helping Angelina Jolie as an artist portray her, it’s a beautiful thing for one legendary performer to channel the soul of another. I wouldn’t be surprised if Angelina Jolie was to receive another Oscar nomination for Maria. So far, critics have been calling her performance “career-defining” with one review even saying she was “deliberate in every breath and syllable.” With The Tourist actress talking about the precise process she took to immerse herself in the Greek soprano singer, I’m confident we’ll see her name among the list of nominees.
After Barry Jenkins told Angelina Jolie her performance was just as strong as Denzel Washington’s in Malcolm X, now I really need to see for myself how the talented actress brings her A-game to the new biopic. Coming to your streaming schedule, Jolie will light up the grand opera stage and your Netflix subscription on November 27th.