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.
It’s been almost exactly 25 years since the debut of that latter film, which won Jolie an Oscar and set her on the path of superstardom, something accompanied by what she calls her tendency to pull back from the industry’s—and the public’s—prying gaze. Maria follows Callas in the final, lonely days of her life, and in that melancholy frame, it gave Jolie the space to deliver 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.