Ana de Armas Says She ‘Felt Very Protected and Safe’ While Filming ‘Blonde’

Ana de Armas has never been without Marilyn Monroe in her life.A native of Cuba, she has seen movies starring Monroe on television.

“I wasn’t aware at that age that she was Marilyn Monroe,” the 34-year-old actress said in an interview with EW. 

When she moved to Madrid at the age of 18 and started studying film, she realized that Monroe was the beautiful woman she was so interested in as a child.

And now de Armas is playing an icon. More specifically, she stars in Netflix’s Blonde, portraying Norma Jean Mortenson, the real-life woman behind Marilyn Monroe.

The film is currently in theaters (it premieres on Netflix on September 28). However, since the earliest speculation about the film, it has sparked a few controversies amid conflicting opinions. And like completely lighting the spark, Blonde is inspired by a novel by author Joyce Carol Oates, an iconoclast, and not a typical non-fictional biography. 

De Armas, on the other hand, witnessed everything from backlash against her version of Marilyn’s voice to feedback questioning the film’s capitalization of a woman exploited for her figure.

De Armas is topless for several parts of the three-hour film. Moreover, her Marilyn undergoes a series of humiliations: being raped by Fox studio head Daryl F. Zanuck, aborting a fetus (with a camera shot from inside her vagina), and a depiction of Monroe giving President John F. Kennedy a blowjob. 

These high demands from actresses require a level of vulnerability and exposure that most people can’t afford…but de Armas insists the only way out is through. Unlike the film version of Monroe, she felt in complete control of every scene.

“It’s harder for people to watch [those scenes] than for me to make them because I understood what I was doing and I felt very protected and safe,” de Armas claimed. 

“I didn’t feel exploited because I was in control. I made that decision. I knew what the movie I was going. I trusted my director. I felt like I was in a safe environment. We had hundreds of conversations about these scenes. Everyone felt a deep respect for the movie we were making. And in that sense, I had no fear.” 

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De Armas Was Comfortable

The scene on the blowjob, specifically, will possibly earn some raised eyebrows – it has already made the film a rare NC-17 rating. But to de Armas, it was a necessary scene to carry the message that she and writer-director Andrew Dominik laid out to give the crowd – a sense of sad dislocation. 

“We actually did two takes of that scene only,” she recounts. 

“We had an intimacy coordinator with us all the time, and she was very helpful. But I wouldn’t even say these scenes were more difficult than any other scene. It was just part of a whole story.

“I knew exactly what the show was going to be. I knew exactly what was going to be seen, what was not going to be seen, and it felt like it was the right thing to do.” 

Apart from the explicit parts of the movie, de Armas was given a job to make both a believable version of Monroe, the Hollywood star, and peeling the façade to show her true self as Norma Jeane. 

She dug for information and studied for nine months, watching films, meeting with a dialect coach, and talking to Dominik about their version of the superstar. 

According to de Armas, she was committed to giving all of herself to her Blonde performance in working for something real. 

“That openness goes to everything,” she said. “You’re open not just to give but to receive and be perceptive.”

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