Angelina Jolie, refusing to be dubbed and wishing to perform her own singing, took 7 months of opera lessons to prepare for her role. For the scenes set during Callas' heyday, an estimated 90 to 95 percent of Callas' original recordings were used, with Jolie lip-synching along to these songs. However, Jolie's singing comes to the fore during the film's final act.
In a 2024 interview with IndieWire, Pablo Larraín spoke in detail about the process of capturing Angelina Jolie's singing voice and why that was important: "She had different trainers. The first one was posture, breathing and accent, being able to properly sing mostly in Italian. And the second is the singing itself. That is about pitch. If we just play a song from a pop music say from Madonna, we could all maybe sing it out loud and be quite decent. You can't do that with opera. No. You can't follow the melody because of the pitch. So you have to follow the structure of the music and get there. John Warhurst, who is a musician and an engineer, has developed a way to work. He did it with Rami Malek, and now the new Michael Jackson movie (Michael (2026)), and Bob Marley - One Love (2024) and so on. He had never done it with opera before, so it was new for all of us. Angie had to wear an earpiece on the set and sing it out loud. And there was no other sound in there but her voice...
So why do we do that? So we capture that sound. We not only have her voice, but we have breathing, every sound that comes out of Angie's physicality is captured in the mix. So sometimes you hear most of it is Maria Callas, as it should be in a movie about Maria Callas, when she's singing well, right? And then in the present of the film, there's more of Angie. Sometimes it's 5 percent, sometimes 50, sometimes 70."
Angelina Jolie was Pablo Larraín's first and only choice to play Maria Callas and he would not have directed the film without her.
The film received an 8-minute standing ovation after its premiere at the 81st Venice International Film Festival, particularly for Angelina Jolie's performance.
The third and final film in Pablo Larraín's so-called "Lady with Heels" trilogy of female-led biopics, following Jackie (2016) and Spencer (2021).