Exclusive: Angelina Jolie On Channeling Maria Callas, And The Costume Designer Who Dressed Her Soul

Pablo Larraín’s film Maria might be the most intimate portrayal of a global icon in recent memory. Set during the final, reclusive years of opera legend Maria Callas’ life in 1970s Paris, the film resists the grandeur of performance in favour of emotional precision. At its centre is Angelina Jolie, who delivers a career-defining performance as Callas—raw, restrained, and devastatingly vulnerable.

It’s a role that demanded more than physical transformation. For Jolie, stepping into Callas’s world meant surrendering to a deeply exposing process—one that required her to not just act, but feel like an opera singer. Angelina Jolie disappears into the soul of Maria Callas in Pablo Larraín’s haunting biopic.

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“It was more than I thought it would be,” she says. “I didn’t understand what it takes to sing opera… there’s a physicality, a strength, a technical side—but really, the hardest part is that you have to somehow just open yourself so much. It’s very exposing. Physically, audibly, emotionally—everything is out. There’s nowhere to hide.”

Directed by the Chilean auteur behind Spencer and Jackie, Maria continues Larraín’s exploration of women on the edge of isolation. But here, it’s not fame or public duty that burdens Callas—it’s memory. The film, iconic based on true events and personal letters, captures her solitude, her fading voice, and her lingering grief.

“It brings up an emotion I’ve never experienced in anything like it,” Jolie adds. “Sometimes in life, the pain is so great, or the love is so great, or the loss is so great, that I now understand it’s only opera that can match and resonate with that moment. I can’t think of any other art form that connects on such an extreme level.”

Behind the elegance of every frame is a meticulous visual language, shaped by costume designer Massimo Cantini Parrini. His work reconstructs Callas’s public grandeur and reimagines her private simplicity with over 60 custom pieces.

“All the costumes of the operas and performances are perfect reconstructions of the dresses worn by Maria Callas,” Parrini shares. “But the dresses from the ’70s, since there are very few images of her in the last period of her life, were designed by me by analysing her state of mind and her taste. She dressed mainly in black, always remaining very elegant.”

One of the film’s most poignant visual elements is the robe Callas wears in solitude—a garment that mirrors her inner stillness.

“It’s a pure wool dressing gown that I had made in Rome by hand based on my design,” he says. “I wanted something ethereal but with an aesthetic importance. I used a 3D process so that it would not be flat. I wanted it to echo ancient Greece in colour and shape, to make her look like a sort of priestess. It is like her second skin—the thing that protects her and envelops her in the domestic sphere.”

If Jolie’s voice reverberates with unspeakable grief, it is Parrini’s designs that silently hold her. Together, they breathe life into a woman who was once the most famous voice in the world—and in her final chapter, found silence more expressive than song.