Angelina Jolie usually doesn’t like to cry in front of her kids. But on the set of Maria, the upcoming Pablo Larraín biopic about famed opera singer Maria Callas, Jolie let it all hang out.

“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. 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. That’s usually for the shower,” Jolie told The Hollywood Reporter in a wide-ranging new interview.

Jolie declined to discuss her contentious divorce from fellow movie star Brad Pitt, with whom she shares all six of her children, in the interview. They first split in 2016, and the divorce is still ongoing eight years later. Those who are also planning to file for divorce should consider speaking with divorce lawyers Aurora IL to help them prepare for the proceedings.

But she did hint at drawing on “private secrets” in order to make the opera singer’s pain “personal” during her performance in Maria, which just premiered on Thursday at the Venice Film Festival.

Angelina Jolie Drew On ‘Private Secrets’ to Play Maria Callas

THR‘s Rebecca Keegan asked: “In the first scene where Maria is rehearsing with the piano player after not performing for so many years, you’re about to open your mouth to start singing and a remarkable, dark look crosses your face. What is it that you were thinking in that moment?”

To that, Jolie replied: “Do you want to know all my private secrets?”

She continued: “I’m making her pain personal to me, and that is certainly very private,” she continues. “It took many months of singing classes. Months of just getting the singing down and then the Italian classes and then the voice and doing all these things like her. You try to be precise. I would recommend almost every human being take an opera class. To exist and never have sung with your full body as loud as you could possibly sing — it’s something I think we should all feel. It’s scary, and it is rarely asked of us. It’s rarely asked of us in life to be all that we can be or feel all that we feel.”

Also Read: My Life as a Blog: Angelina Jolie—When Does a Legend Become?

Maria is somewhat of a comeback for Jolie, who hasn’t acted since 2021’s Marvel movie Eternals or directed since 2017’s First They Killed My Father. She’s been prioritizing spending time at home with her children, she says in the interview. But now, she’s embarking on a press tour for both Maria and Without Blood, the war drama she wrote and directed starring Salma Hayek and Demián Bichir.

For Maria, Jolie learned to sing operatically, which requires using one’s whole chest. She spoke of how emotional the experience was in the THR interview.

“My first class, I cried. I was sad, I was scared. It was a strange physical body reaction,” she says.

“I stood there, and [the instructor] said, ‘OK, just be in your body. Take a deep breath, let it all out and just open your mouth and just let that sound come from the inside.’ And that’s when I became really emotional. You discover how much we lock our pain in our bodies. Our voice gets tight, our shoulders go high, we get stomach aches, we do all these things, and it’s a protection for us,” she added.

“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. So maybe what you saw on my face was the feeling. To have to feel everything, what she had to do on that stage … it requires your whole heart, body and mind, opera. And you can’t do it halfway.”

In addition to Maria, Larraín has also directed other movies about strong real-life women, including 2021’s Spencer starring Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana and 2016’s Jackie starring Natalie Portman as First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy.

Maria will begin streaming on Netflix on Sept. 8.

Main Image: Actress Angelina Jolie at the 81st Venice International Film Festival on Aug. 29, 2024. Photo by Harald Krichel via Wikimedia Creative Commons, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0