Marilyn was with me

THE ACTRESS IS GENERATING OSCAR BUZZ – AND CONTROVERSY – THANKS TO HER LATEST ROLE AS THE BLONDE BOMBSHELL

- Jennie Noonan

To prepare to play Marilyn Monroe in the controversial Netflix biopic Blonde, Cuba-born actress Ana de Armas trained for nine months with a dialect coach and spent more than three and a half hours daily in makeup to transform into the blonde bombshell. Still, most of the transformation was internal. “She was all I thought about, she was all I dreamt about. She was all I could talk about. She was with me,” de Armas tells WHO. “And it was beautiful.”

Andrew Dominik, the Australian director of the film that depicts Norma Jeane Baker’s troubled childhood and the brutal misogyny she endured to live as Hollywood’s most-famous actress of the 1950s and early ’60s, colorfully summed up his star’s performance in an interview with Screen Daily. “She is f--king amazing,” he said. “The one thing nobody’s going to complain about is her performance.”

De Armas was just 14 years old when she first set her sights on acting, joining Havana’s National Theatre of Cuba. At 18, she moved to Spain to pursue her career, landing her first film role in the 2006 Spanish-Cuban romance film, Una rosa de Francia. Just over a decade later, the actress started turning heads in Hollywood with roles in movies like War Dogs, No Time to Die, and Blade Runner 2049. Her lead role in the 2019 mystery drama Knives Out brought her international acclaim, including a Best Actress Golden Globe nomination.