Ana de Armas is earning some of the best reviews of her career for her performance as Marilyn Monroe in Andrew Dominik’s “Blonde,” and yet she’s well aware that it will be her nude scenes that end up getting the most exposure online. As the actor said during her Variety cover story interview, “I know what’s going to go viral, and it’s disgusting.”
“Blonde” is set to stream globally on Netflix starting Sept. 28, which means viewers will have the ability to clip scenes from the film or take screenshots and share them online. De Armas expects her nude scenes to circulate widely online, but that reception to the film never scared her off from taking on the role of Monroe.
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“It’s upsetting just to think about it. I can’t control it; you can’t really control what they do and how they take things out of context,” de Armas said about her nude scenes being pulled from the movie. “I don’t think it gave me second thoughts; it just gave me a bad taste to think about the future of those clips.”
“I did things in this movie I would have never done for anyone else, ever,” de Armas said earlier in the cover story interview about the risks she took to play Monroe. “I did it for her, and I did it for Andrew.”
De Armas’ performance in “Blonde” resulted in a 14-minute standing ovation at the film’s Venice Film Festival world premiere, the longest ovation at the 2022 event. While the film has polarized critics, nearly every pundit agrees that de Armas’ work as the Hollywood icon is a must-see.
“The film is built around a performance, by Ana de Armas, of breathtaking shimmer and imagination and candor and heartbreak,” Variety film critic Owen Gleiberman wrote in his review. “It’s a luscious piece of acting with a raw scream tucked inside. … No actress alive is going to look just like Monroe, but with Marilyn the voice is everything — that’s where her personality lives — and de Armas nails it to an uncanny degree. In ‘Blonde,’ she gives us nothing less than what we came for. She becomes Marilyn Monroe.”
Read de Armas’ full Variety cover story here.
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