‘Maria’: Read The Screenplay By Steven Knight That Became The Libretto For Angelina Jolie’s Opera Icon

Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the scripts behind the year’s buzziest awards-season films continues with Maria, the Maria Callas snapshot-biopic starring Angelina Jolie. Pablo Larraín directed the screenplay penned by Steven Knight.

For Larraín and Knight, the Netflix movie reteams them after 2021’s Lady Di biopic Spencer, which earned Kristen Stewart a Best Actress Oscar nomination. Larraín’s 2016 movie Jackie, about Jackie Kennedy, also earned its star, Natalie Portman, an Oscar nom.

Jolie, already an Oscar winner, here plays the famed opera star as she retreats to Paris after a glamorous and tumultuous life in the public eye. The pic reimagines the American-Greek soprano in her final days as the diva reckons with her identity and life. In real life, Callas died of a heart attack at her Paris home in 1977 at age 53.

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For Knight, the Peaky Blinders creator who was nominated for an Original Screenplay Oscar in 2004 for Dirty Pretty Things, he had the opportunity to build the Maria screenplay around Jolie, who had became attached to the project during the writing process (“Angelina was always the first choice for the role, indeed the only choice,” he says). Already an opera fan, he dove into research around “the more remote and unknown elements of Maria’s life” and was able to access first-hand testimony from Ferrucio Mezzadri, Callas’ longtime butler.

Once Knight and Larraín chose to focus on Callas’ last days, Larraín said, they found “the interactions of the operas she sang could create parallels with her own life.”

“I think this decision [to focus on her last days] helps to make sense of the flashbacks, as if a human being is recollecting and reviewing the span of her life before she leaves this planet forever,” Knight says. “It would be nice to think that all of us would get the opportunity to do this, and I wanted the experience of flashing back to not be torture for Maria but a cathartic replay. She is rewinding the cassette and playing the important pieces.”

The film also stars Kodi Smit-McPhee, Alba Rohrwacher, Pierfrancesco Favino and Valeria Golino.

Maria had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival (it got a 10-minute ovation in its screening on the Lido and almost universal praise for Jolie’s portrayal) and has since been making the big festival stops — Telluride, New York, AFI Fest and London among them — on its way to select theaters beginning today. Netflix, which acquired the film just before it debuted at Venice, releases it on its platform December 6.

Read Knight’s script below.