Angelina Jolie and Cynthia Erivo on MARIA and WICKED for VARIETY Magazine

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In a new conversation for VARIETY’s Actors on Actors issue, Angelina Jolie and Cynthia Erivo discuss how singing opera in “Maria” helped Jolie find her voice, Erivo singing live for “Wicked,” “Defying Gravity,” and Jolie taking her daughter to see “Wicked.”

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Jolie on learning to sing opera, and how it helped her find her voice: “I was terrified. But I think it’s a gift as an artist—and I know you felt this going into your film as well—when you’re just not sure you’re able to do it. You’re not sure you’re good enough. The task, the challenge, is set, and you feel small. It’s a gift for an artist…People keep quoting me because I made, not the mistake—I admitted it was like a therapy. But it really is. Because I didn’t realize the practice of it and the learning of it is one thing, but it was finding my voice and letting my voice out that was really hard for me. And I was really emotional about it. I didn’t know how much I had lost my voice. Maybe when I lost my mother, maybe when someone hurt me—whatever it was, the different things that had made it smaller and locked it away. So finding it and letting it come out was very emotional, and such a feeling that I wish for everybody to have. I wish everybody could know what you feel when you sing at the top of your beautiful voice, and you know what can come out of your body. And it’s not just what you can do for an audience or how you tell a story, it’s that you can make that sound. Maria said something—she said she doesn’t like to hear records, because they’re perfect.”

Erivo on singing live for “Wicked”: “With Broadway, you have to perform to the back of the house. You want them to see everything, you want them to be able to read the emotions, so you have to send it out. When on camera, Jon Chu, our director, took us off track. There were no tracks; we just agreed to sing live on set…When we were doing a song like ‘For Good’ [for ‘Wicked: Part Two’], there’d be silence in my ears, and he’d say, ‘You start, and the pianist will come in.’ We could even include all the breaks in the voice; if it turns into a whisper, then it turns into a whisper, and then you can build from there. That was really the joy of being able to do all of that on set, because you could really connect in the moment, change your mind in the moment.”

Erivo on “Defying Gravity”: “There was this huge responsibility, because it’s such a well-known song. And people know it; people love it. I really wanted to mean it. The physical work of it was hard, because I’m in a harness: I’m flying and I’m singing at the same time—so many things are happening. That was new for me, to figure out how my body, my brain, my voice, would all come together to work as one. I felt really proud of being able to figure that physical, practical side of it. But I think in order to get to a point where I could rule the words, I really thought of all of the journey of getting to that moment. Not just in the making of this particular project, but the journey I’ve taken to get to here: being at drama school at 20, putting myself through, finishing at 23, not getting jobs and not really being seen and not really feeling accepted — feeling very odd, very different. And having to figure out how to make my own way through this, because this business is hard, and this business is very hard when you’re a Black girl who’s singing.”

Jolie on taking her daughter to see “Wicked”: “I can’t not talk about some of the joy of this film that you’ve made. I remember taking my daughter—a few of my children, but my one daughter—who, when she watched ‘Defying Gravity,’ I remember that moment. Because as a mom, we want art to have an influence. I felt that feeling of ‘Oh, she needs this—she’s feeling this desire to know that there’s endless possibility and something within her she hasn’t discovered yet.’ This was how I was feeling about it in that moment. I loved seeing it live. I loved, loved when it came at the end of this film.”

[Photo Credit: Alexi Lubomirski for Variety Magazine]

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