Angelina Jolie on Broadway?
After taking home a Tony in June as a producer on best musical winner “The Outsiders,” Jolie tells me she may be interested in making her Broadway acting debut next.
“I would love to, but I’d be very shy. But if you asked me if I would be singing opera a year ago, I probably would have said no,” she told me at the AFI Fest screening of her new Maria Callas biopic “Maria.” “I started with Strasberg and I started in theater so of course I would love to. But deep deep down, I probably don’t think I’m good enough.”
I suggested she consider a musical now that did seven months of intense vocal and singing lessons for “Maria.”
Jolie laughed, “I don’t know if anybody wants that.”
Jolie portrays Callas in the Pablo Larraín-directed drama about the last days of the opera singer’s life before she died of a heart attack at age 53 in 1977. She recalled her first day of singing lessons.
“I walked into room with the piano, and somebody said, ‘Ok, let’s see where you’re at.’ And I got really emotional. I took a big deep breath, and I let out a sound, and I started crying,” she said. “I think we all don’t realize how much we hold inside our bodies, and how much we carry and how much that affects our sound and our voice and our ability to make sound.
“I’ve been holding a lot for a long time, and that beginning and that sound, and then when that sound would eventually come, it was the best therapy I’ve ever had,” Jolie continued. “Honestly, I think I would tell a lot of people before you try therapy and spend too much time there, go to singing class.”
The unexpected therapeutic side of singing, Jolie said, had the power to heal. “It helped me a lot. There’s something primal about finding your own voice within your own body. It brings up certain emotions that you may have not wanted to confront, and there’s no way to sing at your full voice and your full emotion without confronting your feelings and your limitations.”
Of course, it takes opera singers years, if not lifetimes, to perfect not only their sound but also the ability to control their breath. “Towards the end [of filming], when I really belted out as [Callas], I would get very dizzy because I never got full control,” Jolie said.
“Maria” will be in select theaters on Nov. 27 and stream on Netflix on Dec. 11. The movie had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in August.
