Ana de Armas is considered one of the hottest young actresses in Hollywood for good reason. With recent breakout roles in Knives Out, No Time To Die and Deep Water, the Cuban-born beauty is set to take her career to the next level with Blonde, the NC-17 Netflix biopic in which she portrays legendary actress and pin-up Marilyn Monroe.
Based on a Joyce Carol Oates novel of the same name, Netflix’s first-ever NC-17 release is directed by Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Mindhunter) and scored by cult rocker Nick Cave.
While de Armas has mostly remained mum on the buzzed-about role, EW recently published an article based on a 2019 interview in which she talked about making Blonde.
“It was the most intense work I’ve ever done as an actress,” she told EW. “It took me a year to prepare for that — research and accent and everything you can imagine. Reading material, and talking to Andrew Dominik for months, and getting ready to start. It was three months of shooting nonstop — like, a crazy schedule.”
But she added, “It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever done. Can’t wait for it to come out. It’s a very special film, and Andrew’s a genius. He’s one of the best filmmakers I’ve ever worked with.”
Around the time de Armas shot Blonde, she was also shooting her role as 007’s sidekick spy in Daniel Craig’s final James Bond film, No Time To Die.
“I was preparing for Blonde, and then the film got pushed, and I got called for No Time to Die,” she said. “I went to London, and I only had like 10 days to do two weeks of training, which is not much for everything I had to do, which made me very nervous.”
She continued, “And then, on top of that, Daniel [Craig, who plays Bond] got injured and I had to postpone my shoot and go back to do Marilyn Monroe, which is completely different from everything else — emotionally, mentally, and physically — and then three months later go back to London and go back to being a Bond girl.
“All that training I did was kind of gone and forgotten! But it all worked out, and I was working with the best team possible, and they made it happen, so I’m happy with it.”
Author Joyce Carol Oates, who wrote the 2000 book Blonde that the movie is based on, previously said she saw an early cut of the project and was impressed.
“It is startling, brilliant, very disturbing & [perhaps most surprisingly] an utterly ‘feminist’ interpretation,” she tweeted in August 2020. “Not sure that any male director has ever achieved anything [like] this.”
In addition to Armas, Blonde stars Adrien Brody as Monroe’s third husband, the playwright Arthur Miller, and Bobby Cannavale as famed baseball player and Monroe’s second husband Joe DiMaggio.
In other Monroe-related news, Andy Warhol’s portrait of the actress recently sold for a record $195 million.