“She has guts, she knows how to play everything.
It was time for us to realize that.”
Usually stingy with compliments, Daniel Craig is full of praise for Ana de Armas, who played the most endearing character of
Knives Out
and the twirling and sexy James Bond girl (with her garter belts between seen in a shooting scene…) of
Dying Can Wait.
In two films by his side, the ex-007 joined the club of fervent admirers of the lovely brunette with golden eyes.
Jamie Lee Curtis, her friend since filming
Knives Out,
compared her to Sophia Loren, referring to her European sensibility combined with devastating sex appeal.
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Ana de Armas is only 34 years old but has worked tirelessly.
In 2022 alone, the actress has screened five films, and in 2019 a Golden Globes nomination (for
Knives Out
) cemented her reputation.
In a few years, from
Knock Knock
, her first feature film in English, in 2015, to the main role of
Blonde *
by Andrew Dominik for Netflix, the most anticipated event of the start of the school year, the Cuban actress has never never hid his thirst for success in Hollywood.
And this biopic about Marilyn Monroe, already shrouded in scandal with her ban on those under 17 in the United States, looks a lot like her passport to getting there.
Read alsoBetween distress and glory: the trailer for “Blonde”, the biopic on Marilyn Monroe
In video, “Blonde”, the trailer
She measures the distance covered, from the small coastal town of Santa Cruz del Norte, thirty minutes from Havana, where her family lived without the Internet, computer or even mobile phone... With her friends, Ana animated the neighborhood by playing skits, dancing or imitating the Spice Girls.
She learns by heart the dialogues of films seen on the television of the neighbors and repeats in front of her mirror.
But without imagining himself as an American star.
"At the time, the actors, the Anglo-Saxon lifestyle seemed to me so far from my reality", she confided in 2020. Her parents encouraged her, at 14, to take lessons at the national theater of Cuba .
At 16, she had already landed her first film,
Una rosa de Francia.
His island soon seems too small to him.
Her grandparents are Spanish, Ana flies to Madrid to join them.
She is 18 years old, Iberian television becomes her new learning ground, the time of three series, including
El Internado
(unpublished in France), a huge success.
But the young woman gets bored quickly.
The challenge galvanized her.
The next chapter of his career will be written in Los Angeles, the promised land.
His agent landed him one of the lead roles in
Knock Knock,
an erotic thriller by Eli Roth, the "
King of Horror
".
Only one problem: Ana does not speak English yet!
She will therefore launch her lines phonetically, facing a sympathetic Keanu Reeves.
But out of the question to dawdle in the clichéd roles of "sexy Latina or housekeeper, with an accent to cut with a knife" that she saw as so many obstacles.
Ana de Armas, the cover story
In images, in pictures
See the slideshow15 photos
See the slideshow15 photos
At 26, Ana returns to school: seven hours a day, for four months, she learns the language of Shakespeare.
A determination that paid off.
Because if she still accepts to shoot in Spanish and in her native country for Olivier Assayas
(Cuban Network),
it is perfectly English-speaking, as a hologram in love with Ryan Gosling, in
Blade Runner 2049,
that she has already stood out at the planetary scale.
Among her fans: Nicolas Ghesquière, who welcomed her into the small circle of Louis Vuitton ambassadors.
For the visionary artistic director, Ana has taken her rightful place, between Emma Stone and Alicia Vikander, among the audacious muses who inspire her.
On red carpets and in life.
Because the
His and those of Hollywood.
Her ability to go from laughter to tears in one scene, her charisma as an old-fashioned femme fatale, tinged with a childlike vulnerability and her ferocious determination "to be the first Latina to play Marilyn Monroe" seduced director Andrew Dominick.
In an audition,
Blonde
was hers.
In this sulfurous adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates' bestseller, Ana represents a fictionalized version of the ultimate star, quick to crystallize all fantasies and projections.
“Andrew wanted to present Marilyn's life from his point of view.
And, through Norma Jean, go beyond the sex symbol and the brainless blonde that the orphan had created to survive the physical and psychological violence suffered since childhood”, analyzed Ana during the preview for Netflix, last June.
To express "this audacious and feminist point of view on Marilyn's story", Ana underwent a year of preparation.
She scrutinized every detail of the photos and iconic movie scenes from the star's career.
Her only game instruction: "What did she feel at that time?",
At the time, the actors, the Anglo-Saxon lifestyle seemed to me so far from my reality
In the end, a poignant rereading of the price to pay for glory: "The one that had made Marilyn the most visible person in the world, but made Norma Jean invisible."
Disappearing behind her public persona is a trap that the ambitious Ana already manages to avoid.
Scalded by the pangs of her over-mediatized romance with Ben Affleck (who since preferred to marry Jennifer Lopez), the explorer left Los Angeles for less stifling horizons.
With New York as her home base and a new
boyfriend,
the vice-president of Tinder, she has added a string to her bow, co-production (an adventure comedy,
Ghosted,
soon on Apple TV+).
Ana has guts, she knows how to play anything and now the whole world knows it.
* With Ana de Armas, Adrien Brody, Bobby Cannavale.
Available September 23 on Netflix.