Angelina Jolie says it was 'really emotional' preparing for 'Maria' role

Angelina Jolie says her sons Maddox and Pax played an important role in her upcoming film, "Maria."

The actress, who portrays opera singer Maria Callas in the film about her final days in 1970s Paris, said her sons were doing assistant directing work.

"They've done that quite a few times, and I think that's good for them," she told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview. "Pax tends to do stills and he gets brought in, and Pablo (Larraín) was wonderful and recognized that he was good at it."

Jolie added that she's "never had a set where my family is not allowed to be there." The actress, who described playing Callas in the Larraín-directed film as "intense," appreciated that Maddox, 22, Pax, 20, were there.

"It really meant a lot that my boys were with me on Maria. When I would have really heavy times, they would come over and just give me a hug or a cup of tea," she said. "That was probably one of the more intense things was that —usually when I'm expressing that much pain, it's not in front of my children."

"You really try to hide from your children how much pain and sadness you carry," she added. "And so for them to be with you when you're expressing it at such a level, I think it was the first time they ever heard me cry like that."

What drew Angelina Jolie to Maria Callas' story?

"Maria" is Jolie's first film since she starred in Chloé Zhao's "Eternals" in 2021. She said she identified with Callas' story because of how it overlapped with her own.

"I'm sure there's a lot that will be read into it of our overlaps as women, but the one that's maybe not the most obvious is I'm not sure how comfortable we both are with being public," she said.

"And yet I do love to create, she does love to sing, but sometimes there are all these other things that take that joy away and change the experience of that," Jolie continued. "It was quite hard, what she went through. People were quite aggressive when she wasn't able to be what they wanted her to be. They were very unkind, and she carried a lot of trauma and she worked very, very hard. I just began to really care about her and wanted that aspect of the story to be told."

How did she prepare for the film?

To prepare for the role, Jolie said she took singing and Italian classes, which she said "took many months."

She recalled being "really emotional" during her first class where she had a "strange physical body reaction."

"You discover how much we lock our pain in our bodies," she said. "Our voice gets tight, our shoulders go high, we get stomach aches, we do all these things, and it's a protection for us. The hardest thing was feeling again and breathing again and opening again in the way that this film required that I had really not done for quite a while."

"To have to feel everything, what she had to do on that stage … it requires your whole heart, body and mind, opera," she added. "And you can't do it halfway."

"Maria" recently premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Thursday. Variety reported that the actress received an 8 minute standing ovation.

A synopsis for the film says that it well tell "a story about a woman that lived from the '20s to '70s, a woman who burned her voice, her life, by doing (what she loved) her work."

Starring in the film alongside Jolie are Valeria Golino, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Haluk Bilginer, Pierfrancesco Favino, Alba Rohrwacher and Zora Gerda Fejes.

Ahead of the film's premiere in Venice, Netflix announced that it acquired the film for the U.S. It will stream on the platform at a later date.