In an interview with Hannah Lack, de Armas discusses playing Marilyn Monroe in Andrew Dominik’s much anticipated adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s Blonde, alongside her own fractious relationship with celebrity
The deluge of doorstop biographies, tell-all memoirs, rumour and conspiracy theory dedicated to the riddle of Marilyn Monroe’s life has never conclusively solved it.
But we know where it ends: in Brentwood, Los Angeles, on 4 August 1962, in a scantily furnished hideaway with a kidney-shaped pool, a clutter of pill bottles in the bedroom and listening devices planted in the walls.
The star was buried in a peppermint-green Emilio Pucci dress four days later, and today her marble crypt is regularly covered in lipstick kisses from fans born long after her premature death. Ana de Armas made a pilgrimage to this quiet corner of Westwood Village Memorial Park on the day she began shooting Blonde, Andrew Dominik’s visceral, heart wrenching fictionalisation of the screen idol’s turbulent life.
“We got this big card and everyone in the crew wrote a message to her,” de Armas says as we find a table in the restaurant of a downtown Manhattan hotel on a washed-blue summer morning. “Then we went to the cemetery and put it on her grave. We were asking for permission in a way. Everyone felt a huge responsibility, and we were very aware of the side of the story we were going to tell – the story of Norma Jeane, the person behind this character, Marilyn Monroe. Who was she really?”
For more than 15 years, de Armas has sought roles that swerve the domestic and push her outside her comfort zone. The 34-year-old Cuban-Spanish actor has played intrepid spies and femme fatales, a Dominican sex worker fighting for her life, even a hologram glowing in a neon-drenched, smog-choked dystopia. But it’s hard to imagine a more demanding role than the one Dominik offered her in 2018 – on Valentine’s Day, as it happened. Five years on from the #MeToo watershed, Blonde is an entirely 21st-century take on a 20th-century icon, a confrontational reckoning with the pitch-black stories of Monroe’s treatment by the Hollywood meat grinder.
In many ways de Armas’s task was to play not one person but two: the clunkily named Norma Jeane Mortensen, the product of a traumatic and rootless childhood in multiple foster homes across the sprawl of Los Angeles County, and her alter ego Marilyn Monroe, the siren with the ingeniously murmurous moniker who swallowed her up.
Never mind the daunting logistics of stepping into the teetering Ferragamos of Hollywood’s still-undimmed goddess, whose grip on our collective dreamlife – and continued bankability – reached another apex this year when a Warhol portrait of her sold for $195 million.
The hours of experimenting with fire engine-red lipsticks and wigs in platinum shades, the months studying Monroe’s swaying walk and megawatt smile might not have amounted to much without one, impossible-to-fake ingredient that happily de Armas has in abundance: the kind of charisma that changes the weather of a scene when she steps into it.
Monroe’s own, strange, mercurial talent was legendary, rendering directors infuriated by her pathological lateness and inability to memorise lines awestruck by the alchemy she could work on camera. (Her acting coach Lee Strasberg named only Marlon Brando as having equal gifts.)
De Armas’s indefatigable work ethic has little in common with the reported chaos of Monroe’s, but that internal light bulb is something they share. There is an electrifying moment in Blonde when a panic-stricken Norma Jeane is painted and powdered by her make-up artist to coax her bombshell persona from hiding. When the icon emerges from the depths of a dressing-room mirror – heavy-lidded eyes, candy floss hair, jingle-bell laugh – it’s like a match being struck.
“She would shine from within,” says de Armas, who is looking pretty luminescent herself today, in a vanilla-coloured dress and loafers, her usually dark hair long and blonde, her eyes an impossible-to-pinpoint shade of both honey and green. Over the next two hours, as waiters come and go with grapefruit juice and coffee, it becomes clear that the months she spent inhabiting Monroe’s cryptic, interlocking selves still deeply affect her.
“The more famous Marilyn became, the more invisible Norma Jeane became – Norma was this person no one ever actually met,” she begins. “And Marilyn was someone even she herself talked about in the third person. In some ways Marilyn saved her, gave her a life, but at the same time she became her prison.”
