First impressions can fail, especially if they are surrounded by prejudice. When actress Jamie Lee Curtis met Anne of Arms on the set of daggers in the back he assumed his co-star was “an inexperienced, unsophisticated young woman”. The interpreter of Halloween he made these assumptions because of his colleague’s Cuban origin. “I assumed, and I say this with real shame, because she had come from Cuba, that she had just arrived,” he told the American edition of She.
Ana de Armas is the August cover of this magazine, which devotes a broad profile. In it, the Spanish-Cuban actress reflects precisely on the Latina stereotype in Hollywood. She doesn’t deny her roots, but she doesn’t want them to limit her either. “I want to play Latina,” she says, “but I don’t want to put a fruit basket on my head all the time.” A good example of this dichotomy between not renouncing one’s origins and the search for less restrictive roles is illustrated in this profile, which talks about two very different film projects: one that did not come to fruition and another that will come to fruition and for which Ana de Armas recently made headlines.
Once her prejudices were overcome, Jamie Lee Curtis became a friend and supporter of her partner in Hollywood. She was so impressed that she wanted to introduce Steven Spielberg to play Maria in West Side Story. In the end, De Armas will not get the role, but he will assume another, more complicated at the start, that of Marilyn Monroe. De Armas went to Los Angeles to test out the role while filming alongside Curtis. “She showed me a picture of herself as Marilyn,” the veteran actress recalls. “My father [el actor Tony Curtis] she was at Whit skirts and be crazy, and I have a lot of pictures of him with Marilyn. Ana showed me some pictures and a video of her in motion, without sound. And it was so shocking… she was Marilyn.
“The fact that a Latina actress with a Cuban accent was chosen to play Blond [el biopic de Marilyn Monroe que estrena Netflix el próximo septiembre] It’s not just a sign of her talent, but that Hollywood could become a bit more open about its casting practices. foundry“says journalist Marisa Meltzer in the profile of She. The interpreter agrees, but with nuances. “The problem is that sometimes you don’t even make it to the room with the director to sit down and prove yourself. It’s both exhausting and frustrating,” he said.
A new life in New York
Ana de Armas had an itinerant life. He was born in Santa Cruz del Norte in 1988 and grew up in Cuba, where he made three films. At the age of 18, he moved to Spain, where he worked mainly in television, in series such as Boarding. After eight years, at 26, he decided to give Los Angeles a chance. Until now.
De Armas had a media relationship with actor Ben Affleck, which made the actress the target of all cameras, not just cinematic. “How was it ?” now asks the reporter. “Horrible,” De Armas says bluntly. “That’s one of the reasons I left Los Angeles.” She has now moved to New York, where she lives in an apartment with her boyfriend, Tinder executive Paul Boukadakis. He loves living in the Big Apple, he says. He is only a three-hour direct flight from Havana and much closer to Spain than to Los Angeles, which he really appreciates because, as he admits, he sometimes misses Europe.
Of course, the actress confirms that she has not yet found her place in the city, although professionally she has not found it in Havana or Madrid either. “Sometimes I feel like I’m not part of the Cuban artist community, and then I was in Spain and I feel like I’m not part of the community there, especially because ‘in Spain I did more television than cinema,” he said. said. “And then I’m here, and I feel like I’m not there yet. You know? Am I part of the community? I don’t know almost anyone.” This more personal reflection also meets the aforementioned professional issues. Ana de Armas asserts herself as a Latin actress proud of her origins, but she does not want to limit herself to the borders of a too narrow cliché. for her.