We’re coming into a really interesting time for Ana de Armas. Of course we know Ana de Armas – but mostly, in pop culture at least, for her personal life. Right now, though, it’s her professional life coming into focus. She’s promoting The Gray Man alongside Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans, and as mentioned the other day, this is a big push; the movie is reportedly the most expensive that Netflix has ever made, and Netflix needs a win. So Ana’s repping a summer blockbuster…
And then she’s going straight into promo for Blonde, in which she plays Marilyn Monroe, no big deal. Andrew Dominik’s film (also a Netflix title), like Spencer last year, is a character study. It comes out September 23 and I feel like it’ll totally be doing the festival tour (Venice, Telluride, and/or TIFF) before its release. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago when the trailer came out, it’s possible that Ana’s path will be similar to Kristen Stewart’s all the way to an Oscar nomination.
But let’s not get too far ahead. First it’s about reintroductions because, as noted above, a large cut of the public associates her primarily with Ben Affleck and their relationship that was one of the biggest celebrity gossip fixations during the early part of COVID in North America. This, of course, isn’t fair – Ana’s been working for a long time, in Cuba and Spain before moving to LA nearly a decade ago. She was in Knives Out, one of the most critically and commercially acclaimed films of the last five years. She was in the most recent Bond. Still… let’s not pretend she was a household name before she and Ben became a thing.
That’s the downside. But the upside is that, well, since Ana didn’t have a defined image prior to dating Ben, and since the relationship didn’t last long (they’ve now been apart for longer than they were ever together), she can rewrite perception of her pretty quickly, especially with these two back-to-back projects. And that’s what her ELLE cover story and the press that will follow this summer aim to do: it’s an Ana de Armas reset.
She talks about growing up in Cuba. She talks about moving to Spain and working steadily there and how that experience made no impact in Hollywood – which tells you that some things just don’t change: LA still thinks it’s the end-all and be-all of show business even though there are other super sophisticated entertainment ecosystems around the world doing sh-t that LA hasn’t even thought of yet.
It was obviously intense for Ana in LA during the time with Ben but even without Ben she realised that LA was not the place for her and I particularly appreciate her explanation as to why:
“…it’s always the feeling of something that you don’t have, something missing. It’s a city that keeps you anxious.”
It’s true, and that’s why LA has f-cked so many people up: because it tells you that you’re not enough all the time, that you should be this, or should be doing this, that you should be there instead of here, that you should be talking to her instead of him…
So now Ana lives in New York, with several projects in post-production, and several more going into production, including a movie that’s part of the John Wick universe so she’ll be working again with her friend Keanu Reeves – and Emerald Fennell is writing the script.
But…um…can I just say… I have questions for ELLE’s social media team. Because this is what their feed looks like right now, LOL.
