These days, Angelina Jolie is embracing uncharted territory. She’s coming off her turn as opera icon Maria Callas in Pablo Larraín’s stylish biopic, for which she spent months in intensive singing lessons. Having been running around Los Angeles of late, getting the word out for the film—she was nominated for both a Golden Globe and a Critics Choice Award last week—she’s now already at work on her next film. She logs on to Zoom from Paris while on a break from production for Stitches, an independent drama written and directed by Alice Winocour. In this one, Jolie plays an American filmmaker, which may sound like relatively familiar territory. But again, she’s been tasked to do something she’s never done before: perform a role mostly in French.
“I’m not fluent—I speak a bit, but…to mean every word and give a performance takes a different kind of understanding about what it is I’m saying, to be emotional and not think about the language,” she says. “It’s a different challenge.”
Until Maria, Jolie had not shot an independent film since well before the pandemic. So it’s a surprise to see her go right back into another auteur-driven, dramatically complex film; it’s been well over a decade since she’s worked with that intensity and rigor as an actor. Jolie recognizes this—over the past year, she’s felt different, reenergized, willing and eager to once more take on the kinds of artistic risks that first defined her rise as a performer, in movies like Gia and Girl, Interrupted.
a profoundly vulnerable performance. The role required her to look inward as few jobs of late have, and she’s still working her way through how the experience has impacted her—and what she wants to say about it. But she feels ready to forge ahead, and perhaps also consider why it’s taken her a few years “to come alive again.”
Vanity Fair: You’ve said that doing Maria has reminded you of what it means to be an artist. Can you say more about that—what you feel you’ve gotten in touch with again?
Angelina Jolie: I wasn’t myself for a while, so I wasn’t able to give as much to my work for a few years. To feel like I could work again and communicate and to be with nice people—so much of what I do is collaboration with other artists. When it goes well, you’re creating together. When you’re with nice people and creative people, you learn so much about yourself and about life. You’re in a safe place to play and stretch. I had that with Pablo, and I don’t think it’s an accident that I found another situation [in Stitches] that is very similar with very well-intended, thoughtful people. I was just talking to Louis Garrel, the wonderful French actor, about our scenes and our work. I talked to Alice this morning about life and women’s health, which is a bit of the film. Great art, as an audience or as a participant, can really be very healing and grow us. That’s what we’re all alive for—to discover and feel and create and connect. Without that, we’re just existing, hardly.
It’s been a big part of your life for such a long time. I would imagine it felt quite meaningful to feel that again.
It really does. Probably more than I can even express. If no one receives your piece, or if you don’t connect, then it’s like shouting in the dark. It means a lot that people have responded to Maria. I’ve always felt, ever since I was very young, that film has been a way to communicate with the world and not feel as alone.
We’re all going through this human condition and this life. So it’s very, very healing to be able to be a part of these films and to talk to you about this and to live that way. And I missed it. I realized I did really miss it. I missed being an artist.
When you say you missed it, what did that period look like, where you weren’t feeling that as much?
I went very dark for reasons I’d rather not explain, but I didn’t have a lot of light and life within me. Your light’s dim. I also just needed to be home more, so I couldn’t commit large periods of time to pieces. The choice of what to work on and when was not a creative choice, often, the last few years, but sometimes the practical choice. Really, I think Maria was the beginning of starting to come alive again. I needed a lot of kind people around me to hold my hand.
The emphasis on nice people—
I know I say it too often, but our business can be a lot of things. At the end of the day, we’re very fortunate to do what we do, and we are spending a lot of time with big, deep, emotional feelings. If you don’t do that with people who you’re safe with, it can affect you in very bad ways.
It sounds like something you’ve learned over time.
Oh, sure. We’ve all been with terrible people in our life, where it’s hard to do your work because you feel emotionally vulnerable and then you feel like it’s being used in the wrong way. With a lot of artists, we’re kind of raw. It’s why we sometimes seem a little crazy. Part of what we do is not to be settled. It’s to feel deeply and explore and go to strange places in our mind and our body. If you’re free to do that, these wonderful things can happen. And then sometimes you can be a very vulnerable person in a world that’s a bit dark—and we can break.
Maria is very vulnerable, obviously. What did that experience, on a practical level, feel like to go through on set from day to day?
It was heavy. Maria was a very full experience. I wasn’t able to leave her on set like you sometimes do. Part of that was because I was always doing training after [shooting] anyway; there was always a next aria. But it was all leading towards the death, and the death was the last thing we shot. I’m almost 50, and my mom had cancer when she was 48. You’re actually thinking about death, about things that cause you grief or that you have lost in your life.
I imagine you and maybe a lot of people you know have had moments where you feel so full of grief, but you’re alone. I’ve certainly had those moments of grief alone. To also share them now with not just the set but the world, and to meet other people and recognize that we both have that level of pain, can feel very cathartic—to express heavy things together. She was also funny, but the heavy side, she was…yeah. [Laughs] I think it made me want to try to live more fully. Anytime you do anything about death, you think often about life, naturally.
There’s a nice shape to this moment, given that it’s been 25 years since Girl, Interrupted came out, for which you won an Oscar. You played Lisa, a diagnosed sociopath in psychiatric care—another very heavy character. How do you compare where you are as an actor and an artist to back then?
I haven’t really figured out how I feel about it, but there’s something beautiful or comforting in that there’s something not dissimilar about these women and the person I was 25 years ago. Maybe I’ve come around to her in a different way. Maybe I haven’t lost her as much as I thought I did. Hopefully I’m better in ways: I’m a parent and I’m many other things.
Maybe I’m still trying to connect and maybe I’m still feeling deeply. I don’t know. I’m sure a therapist would have a field day with this one. You’re asking me, and I’m like, my God, some therapist should study these things and tell me what they mean.
Do you remember what it felt like to play Lisa at the time?
I do, which is interesting because I don’t have a lot of memory of my life. I remember that I didn’t think of her as crazy and that she was a real person. She needed to be loved, and she felt alone, and she wanted truth. I only saw it once—it’s hard for me to talk about it because I saw it once 25 years ago—but from my memory, she wanted someone to be honest with her and to connect, and somehow ended up feeling very, very alone in that way—not dissimilar to Maria. Not finding somebody who understood her enough, not finding a way forward where she was okay. Is this a theme? That I’m alone? What is this? [Laughs] There’s probably some very tragic thing that I don’t want to address right now, but—yeah.
Yeah, I understand. Looking back at coverage of the film, Lisa was often talked about as crazy and without the kind of nuance that you’re talking about now. Do you remember encountering that?
I do remember hearing people saying that. Even if they thought they were complimenting me playing Lisa, they were complimenting me playing a crazy person. That did make me sad because I didn’t think of her that way, and I didn’t like hearing I was referred to that way. But it was also a time where I was still trying to understand myself, and maybe there was something about me that I was not understanding—about what people consider crazy. I mean, that’s the honest truth. The honest truth was during that time when you’re trying to figure yourself out and you’re young and you’re a bit wild and strong and curious and emotional—and people say, “No, that’s crazy. She’s crazy. You’re crazy.” It probably just isolated me more and made me think I must be different. Maybe I’m dark, or maybe I’m off, or maybe I’m not what people want me to be either.
Has it felt different with Maria? Just anecdotally, I’ve heard people expressing a lot more affection for her.
I don’t read things, but I have talked to people after screenings who’ve been really kind. But then I’ll also hear people refer to her as a little crazy. People can still watch her and miss the fact that she was this little girl that wasn’t loved.
Which is the text of the film.
Which is so much the text of the film, right. There’s nothing she does that hurts anybody or is against anybody. Somehow she’s seen as something’s wrong with her, something about her rubs people the wrong way. But yes, I think there’s a lot of love for her, and nothing makes me happier than that. If she was a diva at all, for her, it was [because] she was very tough on herself and very tough on anything having to do with her work because she was a perfectionist. She was also somebody who felt that she was perfect or she was nothing—because that’s what her mother told her. She was definitely harder on herself than anybody else could be.
Not to get too psychological, but how do you relate to that idea of perfection at all costs?
By the way, you’d be a very good therapist.
I considered it, I’ll say that. But I am genuinely curious how you connected to that part of her.
I think that’s why it took me a few days to say yes, because I knew that I was walking into the impossible. You can’t be as good as her—certainly can never be as good as her onstage, can never sing as good as her, and can only pray to not disappoint those who love her work. I was scared. I was scared to really fail this one.
Can you take me back to the moment that you took Maria to Venice and how you were feeling that day, both before the screening and after you felt the reaction in the room?
It was a funny thing bringing her to Venice because she was in Venice—we even say it in the film; Onassis talks about seeing her in the Venice Film Festival. I was trying to figure out what to wear, and there were pictures of her in Venice wearing little fur; that’s why I wore a little fake fur. It was strange. And I sing in Italian and I’m in Italy; how’s that going to go? These are people that really know these arias, and this is an art form that is very respected and understood here. I was very excited for those reasons to bring it to Venice and very nervous. When it was received well, when you felt the room appreciated it, it was a huge relief. Then when you’re with people you love, you look around at the faces of the artists that you worked with, and it’s a beautiful moment.
As you’re feeling reenergized creatively, are there filmmakers you have your eye on whom you’d like to work with, or types of work you’d like to do going forward?
What do you think I should do?
Well, as you mentioned, you get to be selectively very funny in Maria. I would love to see you get to do more comedy.
Thank you. I just wrote to a friend of mine today, Eunice, who’s in Liverpool, and she said, “Why aren’t you doing—you should do something funny.” I wrote back and I said, “I’d like to find something funny,” but I’m not sure. I’m never sure how funny I am. I would love to do something fun and light. I think I’d have to be the straight man. I feel like that’s what I am. I get that. In Maleficent, it was like, Okay, I’ll be the straight person.
There are so many wonderful directors I’d love to have a chance to work with. I’d like to just be allowed to play in this arena. I’d love for people to reach out and be willing to invite me to play with them and create with them. So we’ll see. Yeah, comedy, maybe.
Let’s put it into the universe.
If I do it, it’s on you.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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