Ana de Armas Opens Up About Life in the Spotlight and 'Blonde's NC-17 Rating
After conquering Hollywood, in her new Netflix film Blonde, the Cuban actress is taking on her most challenging role yet: the inimitable Marilyn Monroe.
Photography by Thomas Whiteside
Styling by Samantha McMillen
Los Angeles. Valentine’s Day, 2018. A Marilyn Monroe lookalike is cruising around Hollywood in her car. Could it be a celebrity impersonator en route to deliver an awkward in-person candygram? Perhaps. The less obvious guess would be Ana de Armas, in a cheap platinum wig, driving herself to her first audition for the lead role in director Andrew Dominik’s Blonde. A makeup-artist friend had helped her to get into character. “We got the makeup as close as we thought it should be,” de Armas recalls with a chuckle. “Of course, it was so far off from what was [eventually] created for the movie. But it did help, I guess."
Dominik had been trying to make Blonde, based on Joyce Carol Oates’s historical novel of the same name, for a decade. (At various stages, Jessica Chastain and Naomi Watts were reported to be attached to the project). When de Armas completed her audition—the date scene that appears in the trailer opposite Bobby Cannavale, whose character was modeled after Monroe’s ex-husband, Joe DiMaggio—Dominik knew he had found his Marilyn. So did Brad Pitt. His production company, Plan B, produced the Netflix film, which debuts on the streaming service September 28. “[Blonde] was 10 years in the making,” Pitt said recently during an interview with Entertainment Tonight. “It wasn’t until we found Ana that we could get it across the finish line.”
Not bad for de Armas’s first headlining role. The actress, 34, grew up in Cuba and studied acting at the National Theatre School of Havana for four years before moving to Spain and starring in a handful of films and TV shows. She moved to LA in 2014, after being cast as Felicidad Iglesias, the wife of famed Panamanian boxer Roberto Durán, in the biopic Hands of Stone opposite Edgar Ramirez and Robert De Niro. A native Spanish speaker, de Armas landed parts in films helmed by top directors such as Todd Phillips (War Dogs, 2016) and Denis Villeneuve (Blade Runner 2049, 2017), while also immersing herself in English language classes. A mere four years after she arrived in Tinseltown, de Armas was cast as one of the most recognizable icons in American history. “I didn’t grow up knowing Marilyn or her movies,” de Armas admits. “I am proud to have Andrew’s trust and the chance to pull it off. I feel like whether you’re a Cuban or an American actress, anyone should feel the pressure.”
A year and a half would pass from the time that de Armas secured the role of Marilyn Monroe to when she stepped onto the set of Blonde. During that time the actress worked with a dialect coach and researched the icon extensively. Ultimately, de Armas decided that “my job wasn’t to imitate her. I was interested in her feelings, her journey, her insecurities, and her voice, in the sense that she didn’t really have one.”
The film is consistent with Oates’s novel—a fictionalized version of Monroe’s life based on some of the hard truths of her existence. Born Norma Jeane Baker to Gladys Pearl Baker, a single mother and studio actress with unaddressed mental health and addiction issues—harrowingly and brilliantly portrayed by Julianne Nicholson in the film—Blonde follows Monroe from her mother’s fraught care to her life as an orphan, a pinup, and eventually a silver screen icon. Norma Jeane shares her mother’s love of movies and the escapism that they provide, and Marilyn Monroe becomes her mythical alter ego.
At nearly every stage of Monroe’s life, the people who were supposed to care for her would eventually defile her. By showing Monroe in her totality—ambitious, determined, and ebullient, but also scarred by rape, abuse, and rampant misogyny—Dominik and de Armas provide a broader perspective of all that Monroe endured, leading up to her tragic death from an overdose of barbiturates. In one particularly poignant scene in Blonde, de Armas’s Monroe is hysterically screaming during a routine exercise in acting class. When asked by her teacher what she was thinking afterward, Monroe responds, “I wasn’t thinking…maybe I was remembering?”
"My job wasn't to imitate [Marilyn Monroe]. I was interested in her feelings, her journey, her insecurities, and her voice, in the sense that she didn't really have one."
As de Armas grappled with the media’s obsession with Monroe, the actress' own IRL career and the general public’s interest in her skyrocketed. De Armas’s performance as the humble caretaker Marta Cabrera in Rian Johnson’s 2019 murder-mystery Knives Out garnered de Armas a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Paparazzi would sneak photos of her on the Blonde set in full Marilyn getup. De Armas showed off her action star prowess as Paloma, a sexy CIA agent stationed in Cuba, in the splashy James Bond vehicle No Time to Die. This past summer, for the worldwide premieres of The Gray Man—a film to which Netflix reportedly contributed a $200 million budget in the hopes it becomes a longstanding Bond-like franchise—de Armas was dressed exclusively by Louis Vuitton and is an ambassador for the brand. She’s also a Global Brand Ambassador for Estée Lauder and the face of Only Natural Diamonds. All in all, she’s released six films in the past three years, and that was during a pandemic.
De Armas’s personal life also made the headlines. After filming Deep Water she publicly dated her costar, Ben Affleck. The relationship was easy fodder for the tabloids. In a recent interview with Elle, de Armas admitted that that sort of scrutiny was one of the reasons that she wanted to leave LA. (She and Affleck broke up in January 2021; she is now reportedly dating Tinder executive Paul Boukadakis and lives in New York.)
“Something from this interview is going to be taken [out of context] and become something else,” says de Armas. “It’s terrifying because there is nothing you can really do. That’s why having family and people who love you is so important. And [Marilyn] didn’t have that. When you think about that, it’s easy to understand how you can break. People can be so cavalier about commenting on someone’s life or body or sexuality or relationships. It can really do damage.”
Blonde’s NC-17 rating, a first for Netflix, has become a press sensation all its own. Monroe’s hypersexualized persona—whether a reflection of her own desires or how people took advantage of her—is something that Dominik chose to tackle head-on. De Armas agrees. “I didn’t understand why that happened,” she says of the rating. “I can tell you a number of shows or movies that are way more explicit with a lot more sexual content than Blonde. But to tell this story it is important to show all these moments in Marilyn’s life that made her end up the way that she did. It needed to be explained. Everyone [in the cast] knew we had to go to uncomfortable places. I wasn’t the only one.”
"Everyone [in the cast] knew we had to go to uncomfortable places. I wasn't the only one."
Along with Nicholson as Gladys and Cannavale as the Ex-Athlete, Adrien Brody also stars in Blonde as the Playwright (in reference to Monroe’s third husband, Arthur Miller). “I cannot tell you how much I love that man,” de Armas says of Brody. The two had some sensitive scenes together, but in between takes they would crack each other up. “Ana conveys such strength, yet brings a vulnerable frailty and sensual power that feel intimate and steeped in truth,” says Brody. “She has an amazing spirit and sense of humor. We tend to laugh a lot on set but both have a healthy respect for the creative process.”
The actress reconnected with Brody and Chris Evans—for the third time—on the upcoming Ghosted, on which de Armas is also a first-time executive producer. As noted in Blonde, Monroe left her studio contract and started her own production company. She also advocated for equal pay. Those early feminist actions were largely unheard of at the time in Hollywood, and underscore how much more astute Monroe was than people gave her credit for. De Armas points out that Monroe wanted to be taken seriously. “She wanted to have control of the material she was going to work on. No one was thinking like that [at the time].” De Armas echoes a similar sentiment when it comes to speaking about her own career. “Not everything is superhero movies and action films,” she says. “I’m happy to be a part of them, but there’s something else that I yearn for, and that’s other films with directors like Andrew.”
As our interview winds down, I ask de Armas about the significance of the crescent moon tattoo on her right arm. I am half expecting to hear her espouse some spiritual tidbit about how waxing crescent moons represent one’s intentions and desires. It’s almost a relief when she admits that the tat was a bit of a folly.
“I love the moon and the number three is my lucky number, so I went to the tattoo guy and said, ‘Make the moon on day three of the phase,’" she explains. "It was so thin that it looked like a scratch, and I was like, ‘You know what? Forget it. Just make it fatter.’”
HAIR Jenny Cho
MAKEUP Melanie Inglessis
MANICURE Yoko Sakakura
SET DESIGN James Lear
DIGITAL TECH Mike B
PRODUCTION Ilona Klaver
PHOTO ASSISTANTS Reto Sterchi, Steve Yang, and Jacob Messex
STYLIST ASSISTANT Madeleine Kennedy
PROPS ASSISTANT Currie Ritchie
VIDEOGRAPHER Mynxii White
VIDEO ASSISTANT Craig Bull
