“gracious and proper human beings,”
she admits that “the Cuban thing helps.”
“How so?”
She narrows her eyes, waves her finger,
and makes a tsk-tsk noise like she’s watch-
ing a dog contemplate bad behavior.
When de Armas arrived in L.A., she
“demanded” her agents send her out to
auditions, telling them she didn’t come
to Hollywood to get a degree in Eng-
lish. If there’s a story already associated
with de Armas, it’s this one: She did it all
phonetically. On the set of War Dogs, in
which she plays Miles Teller’s girlfriend,
director Todd Phillips “changed a line of
dialogue and it was a disaster. In the end
he was like, ‘Okay, forget it, just say what
you had.’ It’s not a good place to be as an
actor. I couldn’t sustain a conversation.”
“The first time I read for a part, I had
no clue what ‘I beg your pardon’ was,” she
remembers, laughing, “I thought it was
really angry, like ‘I beg your pardon!’ Like
I am going to take your pardon. And every
person in the room was like, ‘She has no
clue what she’s saying right now.’ But the
thing is, I knew exactly what was happen-
ing in the scene. It was a crazy combination
of ‘She has no clue’ and ‘She’s doing it.’ ”
Like all actors, fresh and seasoned
alike, de Armas has nothing but diplomat-
ic adjectives for her projects and costars,
but she absolutely beams when she talks
about Blonde, adapted from Joyce Carol
Oates’s Pulitzer-nominated fictionaliza-
tion of Norma Jeane Baker and directed
by Andrew Dominik.
“I only had to audition for Marilyn
once and Andrew said ‘It’s you,’ but I
had to audition for everyone else. The
producers. The money people. I always
have people I needed to convince. But I
knew I could do it. Playing Marilyn was
groundbreaking. A Cuban playing Mari-
lyn Monroe. I wanted it so badly.”
Before the script came her way, her
knowledge of Monroe was limited to a
few iconic roles and photos, but now she’s
become a human conveyor belt of fun
facts. Even her dog, Elvis, plays Monroe’s
dog in the film. (“His name was Mafia.
Sinatra gave him to her. Of course.”) She
also identifies with Monroe in a more pro-
found way: “You see that famous photo of
her and she is smiling in the moment, but
that’s just a slice of what she was really
going through at the time.”
“I have never worked more closely with
a director than I worked with Andrew. Yes,
I have had collaborative relationships, but
to get phone calls at midnight because he has an idea and he can’t
sleep and all of a sudden you can’t sleep for the same reason...”
“I remember when she showed me a video of her screen
tests for Blonde,” says Curtis, whose father starred with Monroe
in Some Like It Hot. “I dropped to the floor. I couldn’t believe it.
Ana was completely gone. She was Marilyn.”
After months of immersive prep work, it seemed like nothing
could tear her away from her Marilyn love affair. But who among
us has not had our head turned by James Bond?N
O TIME TO DIE director Cary Joji Fukunaga, who’s
been a fan of de Armas for years, wrote the role
of Paloma “specifically for Ana, adding a layer of
humor to the character that I hadn’t seen her do
yet—which I thought might be fun.”
He too is quick to offer adjectives accounting for de Armas’s
appeal (confidence, humor, a can-do attitude), but at the end of
the day, “it’s intangible. People either have that magic quality
you want to watch or they don’t. She has it. If you could quantify
it, you could probably sell it.”
Despite the tailor-made invitation to 007’s world, de Armas
wanted to be sure she was not doing Bond for Bond’s sake.
“Obviously I was jumping all over the place and very excited.
But I needed to be sure it wouldn’t jeopardize all the work I’dbeen putting in, that it wouldn’t ruin everything. And the Bond
women have always been, for me at least, unrelatable.”
Her concerns were valid. In addition to rumors of writer
musical chairs and on-set mishaps—as The Independent put it,
“Has there been a more fraught Bond production than No Time
to Die?”—this is the first Bond film of the Time’s Up era. Yet it’s
not the first time the franchise has attempted to address sex-
ism. Historically, this effort comes in the form of giving “Bond
girls” nonsensically rarefied degrees and character names that
exist to support a single pun. See also: “I thought Christmas
only comes once a year.” Zing. “Bond girl” can be as reductive
as “Latina caretaker, pretty.”
“I don’t even call them Bond girls,” says Daniel Craig. “I’m not
going to deny it to anybody else. It’s just I can’t have a sensible
conversation with somebody if we’re talking about ‘Bond girls.’ ”
Craig was first struck by Ana’s performance in Blade Runner
2049, so his reaction to her being cast alongside him in Knives
Out and No Time to Die was similarly enthusiastic.
“I should always be so lucky to work with a woman like
that. This is a movie where there’s a lot of shit going on, a“Playing Marilyn was groundbreaking.A Cuban playing Marilyn Monroe.I wanted it so badly.”BLONDE AMBITION
De Armas is
going back to her
roots—she was
a towheaded
kid—for her role as
Marilyn Monroe.
Evening dress
and corset
dress by Burberry.