Barry Jenkins Compares Angelina Jolie’s ‘Maria’ Performance to Denzel Washington in ‘Malcolm X’

Barry Jenkins predicts that Angelina Jolie will land an Oscar nomination for her turn as Maria Callas in Pablo Larraín‘s “Maria.”

Academy Award winner Jenkins recently moderated a post-screening AFI Fest conversation with Jolie, director Larraín, cinematographer Ed Lachman, production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas, and hairstylist Adruitha Lee, which IndieWire shares in an exclusive video below.

While praising Jolie’s performance as the late opera singer, Jenkins compared her dedicated transformation to other Oscar-nominated biopic performances from Denzel Washington (“Malcolm X“) and Jesse Eisenberg (“The Social Network”).

“The performance is so striking,” Jenkins said to Jolie. “It’s almost like, to me, Jesse Eisenberg is Mark Zuckerberg. Denzel Washington is Malcolm X, in a certain way. And I think you are Maria Callas in the same way. In this movie, in so many moments, you are performing with your whole body.”

Jenkins also went on to joke that he even helped get Jolie cast in the role.

“You all have to thank me for this film existing,” Jenkins said. “On September 10, 2021, I tweeted, ‘After “Jackie” and “Spencer,” there’s a Warholian quality to this aspect of Pablo’s work that will likely include one more single name portrait of a lady. Not sure which lady that will be, but I’ll be here for it.'”

He continued, “Pablo saw that tweet, and he texted me. He said, ‘Yo, I think you’re right. I should make that film.’ He said, ‘Who should be in it?’ I said, ‘Angelina Jolie.’ He said, ‘Yes. Let’s go do it.'”

“That did not happen,” Jenkins clarified, laughing. “I did send the tweet, but Pablo did not see it,” to which director Larraín said he did, in fact, read the tweet at the time.

Angelina Jolie at the ‘Maria’ AFI Fest premiere

Regardless of how Jolie was cast as Callas, though, her performance in “Maria” proved to be a career-changing experience for the multihyphenate star.

“There’s not a lot of moments in your life where you get asked to give everything you’ve got. It’s one of the greatest gifts, especially as an artist, for somebody to ask for and want you to give everything you’ve got that you don’t know you’ve got,” Jolie said. “I didn’t know how to approach this, and so I listened to her. Maria taught acting, she taught opera, she taught voice. There are so many tapes of her, and she said her process…she calls it straitjacketing. You listen to the piece from the composer as intended, exactly as intended, and you don’t put your emotion in it, your thoughts, your anything. You just have the discipline of learning it with the sound, the pitch, the breath, Italian, the words, everything with that discipline. That was the key to her and who she was.”

Jolie added, “Then, only in the final hour do you bring your emotional self, and by that point, you’re so locked in technically that you can now give the space for your full emotional self and your body, and it works together. I don’t know if I ever understood that fully as an artist until I learned that from her.”

Jolie underwent seven months of training to sing as the opera star. Read IndieWire’s review of “Maria” from David Ehrlich, and check out IndieWire’s interview with Larraín and Jolie.

“Maria” premieres in select U.S. theaters for two weeks beginning Wednesday, November 27, and then streams on Netflix starting Wednesday, December 11.