Ana de Armas: the actress that Spain undervalued and Hollywood embraced

November 10, 2019

Spain has a hard time taking itself seriously. Whether due to an inferiority complex, self-pity, or a joke, Spaniards seem more comfortable with the anecdote that Ana Obregón made a paella for Steven Spielberg than with Penélope Cruz winning an Oscar, expresses Juan Sanguino in a comment in El País.

That's why the news that Ana de Arma (who was born in Cuba, took off as an actress living in Spain and has dual Cuban and Spanish nationality), whom the public had lost track of since the Hispania series in 2011, was auditioning in Hollywood were received with the same mockery with which the Hollywood move of Elsa Pataky, Paz Vega or Lorena Bernal had previously been treated. But the American media are already celebrating Ana de Armas as their next superstar and now the only one laughing is her.

Ana de Armas is not the first actress who, apparently overnight, starts being everywhere. Colin Farrell, Brendan Fraser or Armie Hammer benefited from equally studied image campaigns, but not as explosive ones. Critics have highlighted her as the MVP ("most valuable player," or the number one) of Knives Out, a mystery comedy where Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis, Daniel Craig and Toni Collette are also murder suspects.

Ana will play Marilyn Monroe in Blonde, Netflix's biopic based on Joyce Carol Oates' novel.

She will be the next Bond girl in No Time to Die, she will star alongside Ben Affleck in the adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's Deep Water (Adrian Lyne's return to cinema, director of Fatal Attraction, after almost two decades) and she was a finalist for the role of Catwoman, which will finally be played by Zoë Kravitz, in The Batman.

In Spain, Ana de Armas was always treated like a celebrity. She ended up getting bored with only being offered roles as a sexy teenager and moved to Los Angeles.

It's not common for the name of a casting finalist to leak: if we've found out that Ana de Armas was a strong candidate for the role it's because someone wants us to find out. Similarly, when they eliminated her character from Yesterday (she played the girl who got in the way of the film's central love story) the reasons couldn't have made her look better: during test screenings, the audience fell so in love with Ana de Armas that they wanted the protagonist to end up with her and not with the co-star.

Is this propulsion due to strategy, luck or talent? Probably all three, but above all Ana de Armas is an example that it's not enough to be in the right place at the right time, you also have to know when to leave.

In the house in Santa Cruz del Norte (Cuba), where she was born in 1988, there was no VCR, but when Ana de Armas saw the movie "Matilda" at her neighbor's house she ran to recreate it for her brother.

After meeting Cuban actor Jorge Perugorría's children at a birthday party, she found out that Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón was holding auditions in Havana for "Una rosa de Francia." The director interrupted her in the middle of her audition to inform her that the role was hers. During filming, De Armas met a Spanish representative who suggested she move to Madrid. "In Cuba you grow up thinking that what you have is everything you need and that you should be satisfied with that, but I was always very curious and, why not say it, ambitious. We didn't have friends or relatives in Miami, Spain was my only option to get out of Cuba," the actress would later recall in La Vanguardia.

So when it came time to promote "Una rosa de Francia" in Spain in 2006, De Armas, at 18 years old, took out her red passport from the drawer (which she had thanks to her grandparents being from Valverde, in León, and Guardo, in Palencia) and moved to Madrid without finishing her training at Cuba's National School of Art: if she graduated she would have to spend several years in mandatory social service.

She thought her life savings (200 euros) would be enough for something in Madrid, but she ended up spending it on ice cream and donuts, staying at a friend of a friend's house and auditioning for everything she could. The first was, a week after arriving, for the series "El internado."

Television actors benefit from the closeness that audiences feel toward them, having received them in their living room once a week for years, but then that familiarity works against them.

In Spain, Ana de Armas was always treated like a celebrity and she, after requesting that her character in "El internado" be killed off so she could do film, ended up getting bored with only being offered the role of sexy teenager. In the middle of an economic crisis, Ana de Armas took advantage of the end of her two-year marriage to Marc Clotet, sold all her furniture and went to Los Angeles to study English. There she would once again become, in her own words, a "nobody" whose biggest concern was learning to distinguish present and past verb tenses in six-hour daily classes.

Venezuelan director Jonathan Jakubowicz saw an episode of "El internado" on television during a vacation in Spain and was determined to locate De Armas to give her the role of the wife of Panamanian boxer Roberto Durán in his biopic, "Hands of Stone," alongside Edgar Ramírez and Robert de Niro.

On the way to the airport to fly to Panama, Ana de Armas was approached by a producer who wanted to urgently introduce her to Eli Roth, who gave her a role in the psychological sexythriller "Toc Toc" alongside Keanu Reeves. Reeves got along so well with the actress that he offered her to participate in his next film, "Daughter of God." And that's when CAA (Creative Artists Agency, Hollywood's most important talent agency) signed her and she started working with publicist Anett Wolf, who also manages the public image of Cate Blanchett, the Olsen twins or Cindy Crawford.

De Armas spent meetings nodding without understanding a word of what they said, but she was very clear about what she didn't want: "I don't want to audition for the Juanas and Marías. I want to audition for the same roles as other actresses." "I want to grow and I want to evolve and I want more substantial characters. I have a team of very good agents and lawyers and I must deliver work at the same level. If you're not like that, they won't work with you there," she explained in ICON in a report in which, visionary style, she posed emulating Marilyn Monroe.

Casting directors told her they would call her back in a couple of years, when she could speak English, and she answered: "No, we'll see each other again in two months." They laughed at finding her ambition endearing, but indeed two months later Ana de Armas was already auditioning for the big studios thanks to her agent's insistence on having her seen.

And see her they did. Todd Phillips, the director of Joker, changed the nationality of his character in "Guns Akimbo" to adapt it to her accent.

Joi, Ryan Gosling's virtual companion in "Blade Runner 2049," didn't have an accent on the script either, but the actress convinced director Denis Villeneuve to hire her by assuring him she would be the last person he would have to worry about on that set. "Blade Runner 2049" didn't require her to be particularly fit (although she did appear naked), but the actress imposed a diet and exercise routine on herself to offer the film the best version possible of herself.

"When you get there you feel like you don't fit in, that you're not pretty enough, or blonde enough, or tall enough, or thin enough, that you don't have a good accent. You waste your energy overcoming a whole series of handicaps that both they and you put on yourself. But I want to have it all and I'm going to try," she explained at the time in Fotogramas.

While making her way in Hollywood, Spanish media described her in terms like "a young woman with a sweet face and a disturbing gaze," "so pretty it hurts, with a tender expression, a sexy look and a figure with curves that produces vertigo" or "the only thing left of that schoolgirl who wore the Laguna Negra uniform is that feline gaze that captivates anyone with her intense honey-green eyes." The New Yorker publication, by contrast, admired that every time she appeared in "Blade Runner 2049" she made "the film's imaginative heart pump faster."

She herself has confirmed that all her scenes in "No Time to Die" (the new James Bond film, once again with Daniel Craig, which premiered in April 2020) were written by Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

The trendsetter author in Hollywood, thanks to the three Emmys she won for her Fleabag series, was hired not to make James Bond less sexist but to make the film less sexist. Next April everyone is going to be watching how 007 manages in the post-#MeToo world. Next April everyone is going to be watching Ana de Armas.

In that interview for ICON she told us the only advice her father gave her before leaving Cuba: "Long skirts, short steps." If De Armas has left behind her family, her friends and her life twice it's because she is convinced that her dream has to come true: "Just because there are a thousand like you doesn't mean they're not going to choose you."

She also compares her current life to the one she had in Cuba just over a decade ago. "There were no stores or advertisements there, while in Los Angeles they're obsessed with fashion and shopping. And if magazines and billboards tell me to buy boots, well sometimes I'm going to buy them," she joked in Harper's Bazaar.

Awaiting the public's verdict, Ana de Armas only has to call her parents, who still live in Havana, to keep her grounded: "Every time I tell them I've been given a role, they don't always understand the magnitude. I have to remind them who Keanu Reeves is. But they're just happy that I have work."