Monica Bellucci has made a career of playing women who don’t so much step into a room as detonate in it. Whether it’s Persephone in The Matrix Reloaded, Anita Ekberg in The Girl in the Fountain, or, more recently, a grieving matriarch in Mafia Mamma, she tends to land roles where the word “formidable” doesn’t feel like hyperbole. But for the past few years, she’s been embodying a different kind of icon: Maria Callas, the late, volcanic opera singer whose life played out like a libretto—equal parts triumph, heartbreak, and myth.
Since 2019, Bellucci has been performing Maria Callas: Letters and Memoirs, a stage piece where she reads the soprano’s personal writings in English, French, and Italian. “We represent more Maria than Callas,” she tells me, drawing a line between the diva onstage and the woman who lived and loved off it. “It’s so direct. We share the same breath with the audience for an hour and a half. Every time it feels like the first time, and every time I ask myself, ‘Why am I doing this?’ Because the emotion is so strong.”
She isn’t exaggerating. Bellucci says it takes her two full days to come down from each performance. “The theaters are so big, with so many people. We started in Paris in a 400-seat theater. Then we did Greece, in front of 4,000 every night. Rome, London, Istanbul, Portugal. Now we’re ending in New York, where Callas was born in 1923. A hundred years later. It feels like fate.”
The letters, compiled after filmmaker Tom Volf’s documentary Maria by Callas, revealed to Bellucci the woman behind the legend. “What moved me was the duality between the diva and the divina—this immense talent, but also a woman with a simple heart. She died of sadness, of a broken heart. But maybe we should say she lived a brave life.”
Opera wasn’t entirely foreign to Bellucci—she’d brushed against the world during Mozart in the Jungle—but Callas gave her a crash course in the art form’s intensity. She cites Callas’s performance of Carmen in Hamburg as a personal talisman. “I listened to it before going onstage. She was fire. Full of energy, full of love. It gave me energy, too.”
Even without singing, Bellucci says her own voice becomes her instrument. “The voice changes throughout the show, as Maria changes—young, full of hope, then more mature, finding balance, then in the end handling her melancholy with elegance. The voice is like music. People need to feel something through it.”
This isn’t her first flirtation with music. She laughs when I bring up her collaborations with Ibrahim Maalouf. “I was talking, not singing,” she insists, though it’s the kind of spoken word that still lands her in record shops. “Even when you don’t sing, you have to project emotion. The voice carries its own melody.”
The film world hasn’t been ignored in the meantime. She shot Mafia Mamma with Toni Collette—“She’s amazing, full of energy, and we loved working together. It’s a comedy about the Mafia with a feminine twist”—and fielded the inevitable Matrix questions. “No, I wasn’t asked back,” she says of The Matrix Resurrections, though she makes it clear she wouldn’t have said no. “It was such a beautiful experience. I was in Paris, I went to see The Matrix, and I said, ‘Oh my God, I would love to be in a movie like that.’ Then a few months later, I was in Los Angeles doing the screen test. I was so happy.”
Bellucci seems to accept that she’s magnetized toward roles where “diva” is both compliment and curse. “Anita Ekberg, Maria Callas—they were women in a man’s world. They were fighters. Callas wanted a divorce when divorce was forbidden in Italy. She had the courage to follow her heart. People say she had a tragic life. I think she had a brave one.”
There’s a moment where Bellucci muses on why these roles keep finding her. She doesn’t chase them, she says—“the opportunities come.” But when they do, she takes them with the same kind of boldness Callas once sang into the world. That boldness, she suggests, may be the real connective tissue between Persephone, Ekberg, and Callas. All strong women. All larger than life. And, for Bellucci, all worth the fight.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
