The best actress Oscar nominee confesses her first reaction to Andrew Dominik’s "shocking" script and the divisive response to the Marilyn Monroe biopic: “As hard as it is to hear when people don’t like your film, it is what it is.”
Ana de Armas’ casting in Blonde was an intriguing risk from the get-go — she even says so herself: “It was against all odds that a Cuban actress was ever going to play Marilyn Monroe.” Add to that the nature of writer-director Andrew Dominik’s script — adapted from the Joyce Carol Oates novel, which does not shy away from speculation or the imagined darker, violent parts of Monroe’s life — and the movie was all but guaranteed to cause a stir.
When Blonde premiered at the Venice International Film Festival over the summer, the NC-17-rated film garnered a 14-minute standing ovation, though reception to the movie since has been decidedly more polarized. Some critics and audiences have taken issue with the film’s creative liberties with Monroe’s story, including scenes of sexual assault and graphic violence. But de Armas has been hailed as a tour de force, as evidenced by her Oscar nomination — her first — for the role.
THR caught up with the star, whose breakout Hollywood role was only a few years ago, in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out, for her take on the experience of making Blonde and the stark reaction to it.Seeing other people trusting and believing in you sometimes gives you the courage to believe that you can do it. That was the case when I met Andrew. He said he knew we had a problem with my accent, but there was something else that somehow convinced him that I was the right person for it. I think that was contagious — it’s that little push that we all need when in doubt.
He was so confident about it, after the audition especially. There’s nothing better than working with a director [who] really looks up to you, really believes you’re the person he was looking for. It made me feel that I was in the right hands. It wasn’t an easy yes, but at the same time, it was like, “I cannot let this go. This is my chance. This is the part that you wait for your entire life. And it’s here.” It was against all odds that a Cuban actress was ever going to play Marilyn Monroe. I was like, “I really have to do this, for myself. This is a gift to me. I have to take advantage of it. It’ll be what it’ll be — maybe I’ll never work again. But I have to do it. Because what are the chances this is going to ever happen again?”
He reached out to my agents. I met him, I read the script. And I asked him for a week to prepare for the [audition]. That was an audition for Andrew. Then we had a lot of other people — producers, studios — everyone that we needed to convince because they were not very sure. And that was a bigger production day — camera test and hair, makeup, the whole thing. But it was crazy because I was shooting Knives Out. And [in] Knives Out, I was playing a very different character. So my brain was trying to figure it out.
It was shocking. I remember telling Andrew when we met after I’d read the script that it felt like a horror movie to me. He agreed with that. I think one thing that I had that helped me was actually not being American. All this information that people have of Marilyn, [they] just have a very specific narrative about her life and who she was. I didn’t have all that. [Blonde] is a shocking way of telling her side of the story. I thought it was really interesting and real. I have watched movies about Marilyn before, and they’ve always felt in the same tone — repetitive, following the things that we already know [about] her as a movie star. That intimacy, that private, deeper side of her in her psychology, or trauma, which is what Blonde is about, that was missing for me. When I read [Blonde,] I was like, “Oh, this is it. What I’m reading makes sense to me for someone whose life ended in a very tragic way, so soon.” To have that ending, you need to fill up the gaps between all the beauty and the glamour and the superstar story that we know — there were pieces that were missing.
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