Ana de Armas is having a major Blonde moment.
The official trailer for the Netflix film about Marilyn Monroe has dropped and shows the No Time to Die actress’s full transformation for the iconic role.
The NC-17-rated film is based on Joyce Carol Oates’s bestselling novel and reimagines the life of Norma Jeane, looking at her public and private personas. So while de Armas looks spot on and glamorous as the famous blonde — and her Cuban accent replaced with a breathy whisper à la Monroe— the trailer gets dark and intense showing snippets of the bombshell’s well-documented struggles before her death in 1962.
The words “Watched by all. Seen by none” flash on the screen amid her life lowlights to reiterate that.
Clearly much work went into de Armas’s makeover the role and recreating famous Monroe moments, whether it was the star atop the subway grate or dancing in diamonds on the set of Gentleman Prefer Blondes.
With the trailer drop, Netflix also released new stills from the film, directed by Andrew Dominik, and they show meticulous attention to detail in the Bond Girl’s Monroe makeover.
One image shows her with Adrien Brody, who plays “the Playwright,” Arthur Miller, Monroe’s third husband. It’s almost identical to the original taken in 1957 in Amagansett, N.Y..
Another shows de Armas’s Monroe cozied up to “Ex-Athlete” — Bobby Cannavale’s Joe DiMaggio. The superstar was married to the baseball player prior to marrying Miller.
This is de Armas’s Monroe with Xavier Samuel as Cass Chaplin and Evan Williams as Eddy G. Robinson Jr. (The book detailed a threesome between them, but that has been called an inventive story.)
Another shows her practicing Monroe’s arm movements to recreate the “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” dance for 1953’s Gentleman Prefer Blondes.
They also recreated several old magazine covers that featured Monroe.
In teasing the release of the trailer for the film, out Sept. 28, de Armas wrote on Instagram Wednesday that it “was such a gift to get to work with actors” including Brody and Cannavale “on this beautiful project. Can’t wait for everyone to see the wonderful work they do in this film.”
In an interview with Elle earlier this month, de Armas spoke about a being dark-haired Latina with an accent being cast as Monroe for this film — and how it’s a small step toward inclusivity in Hollywood.
“I do want to play Latina. But I don’t want to put a basket of fruit on my head every single time,” she told the mag. “So that’s my hope, that I can show that we can do anything if we’re given the time to prepare, and if we’re given just the chance, just the chance. You can do any film — Blonde — you can do anything. The problem is that sometimes you don’t even get to the room with the director to sit down and prove yourself.”
In the same article, Jamie Lee Curtis, her her Knives Out co-star marveled at de Armas morphing into Monroe for Blonde, saying, “She showed me a picture of her as Marilyn. My father [Tony Curtis] was in Some Like It Hot, and I have a lot of photos of my father and Marilyn. It was a couple of still pictures and one video of her moving through space with no audio. But it was so shocking because she was Marilyn.”
