In September 2022, just after Blonde premiered at the Venice Film Festival to a 14-minute standing ovation, Ana de Armas sat down with Willie Geist for TODAY’s "Sunday Sitdown" in New York.
From a small town near Havana
De Armas grew up in a small town outside Havana, with two TV channels and no videos. When a film or a telenovela was on, she did her homework and helped her mother beforehand, because nobody could move her from the couch. Then she ran to the mirror to repeat the scenes. At 14 she entered the National Theatre School in Havana, and hitchhiked there because it was quicker than the bus. She moved to Spain and landed a regular role in the series El Internado, but felt frustrated, and admits she is not very patient. In 2014 she moved to Los Angeles, where she learned English phonetically for her first roles.
Her break came with Knock Knock (2015), opposite Keanu Reeves, then Knives Out (2019), which earned her a Golden Globe nomination. She first turned that part down: the description read "Latina caretaker", and she thought she had seen it before. Once she read the script, she rushed to send her audition tape.
Becoming Norma Jeane
Directed by Andrew Dominik and based on the novel by Joyce Carol Oates, Blonde is not a biopic. Being Cuban, de Armas knew little about Marilyn Monroe, so she set out to discover Norma Jeane as much as the movie star. For her, the film shows the price of fame: people wanted "Marilyn", a product she had to keep delivering. The first time she saw herself as Monroe in the mirror, everyone in the room cried. She is in every scene of the film, and calls the shoot exhausting: "I cannot imagine what it was like to be her for 36 years."
Her family in Cuba is very proud. A classmate from drama school recently posted a photo of their class, reminding everyone how they used to dream together, and saying they should all be proud of her. "It makes me proud to make them proud."