The walls of Eric Vetro’s studio are lined with keepsakes and mementos. In one corner, Ariana Grande’s first ever platinum record sits not far from a translucent guitar designed by Shawn Mendes. In between hangs a gold record from Sabrina Carpenter. On the opposite wall, platinum records from Mendes and his ex-girlfriend Camila Cabello sit atop each other, next to other plaques from Rosalia and Becky G. Beside his “wall of selfies”—hundreds of pictures of Vetro and his favorite students—hangs the platinum record for Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream.
“I keep a lot of them around,” Vetro admits over Zoom as he virtually takes me on a tour of his musical dojo, located in his home in Toluca Lake, CA. Over the course of his career, the 58-year-old has become indispensable to his A-list clientele. He’s the voice teacher you call when your client needs to hit the high note—whether that’s in the booth or on a soundstage. This film season alone, he’s responsible for getting Grande into Glinda shape for Wicked, teaching Angelina Jolie to hit high C’s as opera diva Maria Callas in Maria, and helping Timothée Chalamet channel Bob Dylan for A Complete Unknown.
While we’re in the middle of chatting, he gets a Facetime call. “Omar? Can I call you back in five minutes? I’m on with Vanity Fair,” says Vetro, apologetically. “Absolutely not,” jokes recording artist and Queer star Omar Apollo, apparently a few hours early for his own Facetime voice lesson. “He taught me everything I know,” Apollo tells me after Vetro virtually introduces us. After figuring out how they got their wires crossed, Apollo bids a fond farewell to Vetro, who he’ll see in approximately two hours. “Phew! Okay. Now we have more time,” Vetro tells me, regaining his focus. Clearly, getting time with Vetro is a rare and valuable thing.
Despite working with celebrities day in and day out, Vetro never dreamt of stardom himself. Growing up in rural upstate New York, he had quirky tastes, preferring the vocal stylings of Elvis Presley and Judy Garland over the popular music of the day. Ironically, he got to work with both—in his own way—when he coached Austin Butler and Renée Zelwegger for Elvis and Judy, respectively. “I don’t think a lot of kids fantasized about giving a voice lesson to Judy Garland, but I did,” Vetro says.
When he was cast in his high school production of West Side Story, Vetro was happiest when he was handpicked by the musical director to help his classmates learn their parts. “That gave me an identity, because I didn’t have a strong identity growing up,” he says. “Like, oh, this is what I do: I play the piano. I’m good at helping people learn songs.”
Vetro went on to do what many talented, musical-theater-pilled kids do upon high school graduation: he went to NYU. After graduation, he dabbled in performance for a few months, before finding that a light dose of stage fright confirmed he was happiest behind the scenes as a vocal coach. “I’ve actually never done anything since,” Vetro says. “I’m essentially doing the same thing now that I did when I was in junior high and high school.”
In a crowded industry—you can’t throw a rock in New York without hitting a voice teacher—Vetro distinguished himself the old-fashioned way: “Good word of mouth,” he says, matter-of-factly. The power of good reviews landed Vetro a gig with cabaret singer Samantha Samuels. Together, they toured the country for a year. Instead of returning to the east coast afterwards, he decided to give Los Angeles a try. He never left.
One of Vetro’s first high-profile clients—and quite clearly, one of his favorites—was Ariana Grande, whom he met even before she made her Broadway debut at the age of 13. Vetro remembers being introduced to the “angelic” Grande via another student of his, and initially getting a reluctant vibe from her mother, Joan Grande. “Her mother had been a bit hesitant about her taking voice lessons, because she did have such a great natural talent,” Vetro says. “Her mother didn’t want someone to step in and interfere with the naturalness of her voice.”
Nevertheless, Joan decided to take a chance on Vetro. “I knew the minute I met her, before I even heard her sing, I was like, ‘There’s something about this girl. She is a star,’” he says.
Cut to 13 years later, when Grande—now a Grammy-winning pop sensation—first got the call to audition for her dream role: Glinda in Wicked. After years of belting and riffing, retraining her voice to sing Glinda’s legit soprano required dusting off some cobwebs. “We worked every day for several months—first on the audition, because she was insistent on earning the role,” says Vetro. “She worked really hard on the audition, and actually sang for both roles the first time.”
Getting Grande to hit the notes wasn’t Vetro’s mission—he knew she could do that in her sleep. “I wanted her to be able to just step out, whether it’s 3:00 in the morning or midnight, and be able to sing that music easily,” he says—a skill made even more necessary considering that she, Cynthia Erivo, and another client of his, Jonathan Bailey, all sang live for the film. Soon enough, his wish was granted. “‘My voice is so developed from everything we’ve done. I don’t need a long warm-up,’” he recalls Grande saying eventually. “That made me really happy, because I thought, “She’s going to be able to do this under any circumstance. If they say, ‘stand on your head and sing a high C,’ she’ll be able to do it.”
Like the proud longtime vocal coach he is, Vetro quickly points to two Grande performances—“God Is A Woman,” from the 2018 VMAs, and the 2016 VMAs where she sang“Side to Side” while riding an elliptical machine—as evidence of her innate ability. “She’s able to do those things,” he says. “But I wanted to make sure she could hit the high notes and sound operatic.”
When Angelina Jolie sought out Vetro, she was on the opposite end of the spectrum. Jolie needed his help to transform into arguably the preeminent opera diva of all time, Maria Callas. “Not only was she not a singer, she never sang,” says Vetro. “She didn’t even sing ‘Happy Birthday.’ She had a real block about singing.”
Taking someone from “Happy Birthday” to “Piagente Voi?” from Anna Bolleno may sound impossible, but Vetro was up for the challenge. In his early days of teaching he “treated everybody,” Vetro says. “If someone had never sung before, they would send them to me.”
Though Jolie was in the right hands, it took some time to get her opera-ready. “The first lesson, she barely uttered a sound,” said Vetro. “I couldn’t get her to sing. She was very, very, very shy about it.” Vetro enlisted outside help—female opera singers to demonstrate high notes he couldn’t reach, and a fluent Italian speaker to help Jolie with the diction. Little by little, they helped Jolie discover her voice—a poetic parallel to Callas rediscovering her own voice in the twilight of her life in Maria.
“We made the big discovery that she was actually a soprano, which was really surprising to both of us,” he says. “There was one day into it, probably in the middle of the process, when she started singing one of the arias from the movie. And I knew that day it was going to work.”
Of course, in Pablo Larrain’s finished film, Jolie’s voice is heavily mixed with Callas’s own. Still, Vetro says Jolie’s work ethic and deep admiration for Callas were pivotal to her performance. “She loved Maria Callas,” he says. “She felt a lot of empathy for what Maria Callas had been through, how she had been treated in the press—when they would ask her really inappropriate questions about her ex, Aristotle Onassis.” And it all paid off. “By the end of it, she was singing every note, singing every lyric,” he says. “It was a really difficult task. And she rose to the occasion.”
While he may have worked a miracle with Jolie, not every client is so lucky. Vetro admits that a handful of high-profile clients have sought his services, but wound up being beyond even his reach. He recalls a Broadway musical looking to cast a young male actor who’d recently made “a big splash” in a Hollywood film. “They called me and they said the phrase that everybody wants to hear but you very rarely hear, which is ‘money is no object,’” Vetro says. “We will pay you anything. And you can see him as often as you want. We really want him to star in this Broadway show.”
At first, Vetro was optimistic. “We started talking and he had a great personality. I thought, “Oh, my God. This is going to be heaven. This guy is great. This is going to be fantastic.’” Then the actor opened his mouth. “He went to sing, and he just had no sense of pitch,” Vetro says. “I hate to use that expression ‘tin ear,’ but he had no ear whatsoever.” While Vetro could have strung the actor along, they didn’t make it through their session. “I had to say to him halfway through, ‘This isn’t going to work. You can’t do this,’” he recalls.
Sometimes, tough love is the best medicine. “The next day, the phone rang. It was his girlfriend—and she was talking very quietly, so no one else could hear it,” Vetro says. “She said, ‘Thank you for being honest with him. I’m a singer, and I wanted to tell him, but I thought he’ll hate me if I tell him.’”
Try as he might, Vetro can’t always turn off his vocal coach impulses. “So often I can’t help but think, ‘Oh, if I had worked with this person, this is what I would have done,” he says. “I’ll be at a concert or at a Broadway show and I go, ‘It’s too nasal. Why are they doing that?’ Well, the teacher probably said it’s probably in a healthy place, and that’s good. They’re right it is healthy, but it’s too much. They’re overdoing it.”
Someone who struck just the right balance was Chalamet, who has earned rave reviews for his embodiment of Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown. For actors like Jolie or Chalamet who are tasked with recreating an iconic voice, Vetro is less interested in impersonation than interpretation. “We’re trying to capture the essence, what makes them unique, what makes them special,” he says. “It’s always about studying the person. But the really good actors are able to capture something that you can’t even put into words.”
Vetro began working with Chalamet on a very different musical film—Wonka (2023)—and got to see firsthand how the young actor transformed to fit each role. “He was different in his lessons when he was working on Willy Wonka than he was when he was working on Bob Dylan,” says Vetro. “That character had such a different high energy, and Bob Dylan had much more of a laid-back energy. And so Timmy was different in his lessons when he was working on Wonka as when he was working on Bob Dylan. He would come in with a guitar quite often with that harmonica holder around his neck, and he would start talking like Bob Dylan.”
Like Grande, the ultimate goal for Chalamet was to get him comfortable singing live as Dylan—even if Vetro had an inkling he’d need to master that skill even before director James Mangold decided to shoot the film’s musical sequences that way. After working with Monica Barbaro, who played Joan Baez, as well, Vetro was even more convinced that recording A Complete Unknown’s music live would work. “They’re both so good at this that I have a feeling we’re going to be able to pull this off live,” Vetro thought. “And sure enough, I think when they got there, the director was able to identify that: ‘You know what? Let’s do this live.’”
If you’d like to hire Vetro’s services for yourself or a loved one, good luck. As of now, he’s booked to the gills. “I’ll meet people all the time and they go, “Oh, I’d love to give my wife some lessons,” he says. “And I go, “I’m so sorry, I don’t have the time. I really only have the time to work with people who need it for their career.” Unless you’re Jeremy Allen White, who’s playing Bruce Springsteen in a musical biopic about the making of his iconic Nebraska album, Deliver Me From Nowhere. “Jeremy really surprised me,” says Vetro. “He came so far so fast. From our first lesson on to the rehearsals, he just skyrocketed into Bruce Springsteen. I was really impressed by him.”
But recreational singers are not entirely out of luck. You can always enroll in Vetro’s BBC Maestro series “Sing Like the Stars” where Vetro offers an eight hour masterclass complete with cameos from Sabrina Carpenter and John Legend—did we forget to mention that he works with John Legend too?—that’s designed to help any singer of any level improve their chops.
“I obviously can’t work with everyone,” Vetro says. “But there’s so many people who want to improve their voice—maybe just for amateur performances. Maybe they have a band that they play with on the weekends, maybe they do their community theater, or maybe just want to sing well at karaoke one night. So I dove into making this course.”
Does designing such a syllabus mean that Eric Vetro believes anyone can sing?
“No, I don’t,” he answers with a smile. “I really don’t.
“I know people don’t want to hear that,” he continues. “They want me to go, yes, of course anybody can sing. But I’m just going to be honest: No, I don’t think they can.” Which doesn’t mean aspiring singers should lose hope just yet. “What I would say, though, is that I think that anyone can improve.” He waits a beat. “Almost anyone can improve.”
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Plus: the 68 Best Christmas Movies of All Time
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