Ana de Armas

Ana de Armas (birthname: Ana Cella de Armas Caso) is one of the few Cuban-born film actors to achieve Hollywood star status. That status was solidified in 2022 with the arrival of filmmaker Andrew Dominik’s adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ acclaimed novel about Marilyn Monroe, Blonde.

De Armas’ feature debut occurred in 2006 with the Spanish-Cuban co-production, Una rosa de Francia, starring Jorge Perugorria. De Armas made the poster for her second feature and first purely Spanish production, co-writer/co-directors Alfonso Albacete’s and David Menkes’comedy-drama, Sex, Party & Lies (2009), with Mario Casas. De Armas reunited with Menkes for the comic Spanish-Venezuelan co-production, For a Handful of Kisses (2014), which premiered at the Malaga film festival.

Ana de Armas began her shift to a Hollywood career with Eli Roth’s thriller shot in Chile, Knock Knock (2015), starring Keanu Reeves which made released by Lionsgate after a Sundance film festival premiere. Reuniting with Reeves, de Armas co-starred in Lionsgate Premiere’s Exposed (2016), which was disowned by writer-director Gee Malik Linton, who took his name off the credits in lieu of the pseudonym Declan Dale. Co-starring with Edgard Ramirez, Robert De Niro, and Usher, Ana de Armas joined the boxing drama, Hands of Stone (2016), written and directed by Jonathan Jakubowicz. De Armas’ first Hollywood studio film was director Todd Phillips’ black comedy, War Dogs (2016), starring Jonah Hill, Miles Teller, and Bradley Cooper and released by Warner Bros.

De Armas’ name was above the title of the Fast and Furious-like Overdrive (2017), with Scott Eastwood and Freddie Thorp. Becoming a huge holograph, de Armas played the fantasy character of Joi in Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017), her biggest studio film to date and starring Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Robin Wright, and Jared Leto. De Armas joined the cast of Joel Kinnaman, Rosamund Pike, Common, and Clive Owen for co-writer/director Andrea Di Stefano’s crime thriller, The Informer (2019).

For the first time, Ana de Armas was cast by a major film auteur, Olivier Assayas, in the spy thriller about Cuban spies in the U.S., Wasp Network (2019), released theatrically and then streaming on Netflix; it co-starred the impressive roster of Penelope Cruz, Edgar Ramirez, Gael Garcia Bernal, and Wagner Moura. De Armas’ true breakout performance came in writer-producer-director Rian Johnson’s box-office hit, Knives Out (2019), in which she stood out amidst the starry cast of Daniel Craig, Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Don Johnson, Toni Collette, Lakeith Stanfield, and Christopher Plummer; the murder mystery earned over $311 million worldwide on a $40 million budget.

Ana de Armas was picked by writer-director Michael Cristofer for his crime drama film, The Night Clerk (2020), starring Tye Sheridan, John Leguizamo, and Helen Hunt, followed by her turn as a supporting “Bond Girl” in No Time to Die (2021), with Craig in his Bond swan song, and Lea Seydoux, Rami Malek, Lashana Lynch, Ben Whishaw, Naomie Harris, Jeffrey Wright, Christoph Waltz, and Ralph Fiennes.

It was the second movie in which de Armas played with Craig to earn huge box-office numbers: Over $774 million worldwide. In 2022, after two streaming productions playing opposite Ben Affleck (in Adrian Lyne’s Deep Water for Hulu) and Ryan Gosling (in the action thriller, The Gray Man, for Netflix), De Armas starred in her biggest role to date as Marilyn Monroe in Andrew Dominik’s NC-17-rated Blonde, with Adrien Brody, Bobby Cannavale, and Julianne Nicholson, premiering at the Venice film festival and theatrically released by Netflix.