Ana de Armas (birthname:
Ana Cella de Armas Caso) is one of the few Cuban-born film actors to achieve Hollywood star status. That status was solidified in 2022 with the arrival of filmmaker Andrew Dominik’s adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ acclaimed novel about Marilyn Monroe,
Blonde.
De Armas’ feature debut occurred in 2006 with the Spanish-Cuban co-production,
Una rosa de Francia, starring Jorge Perugorria. De Armas made the poster for her second feature and first purely Spanish production, co-writer/co-director Alfonso Albacete’s and David's comedy-drama,
Sex, Party & Lies (2009), with Mario Casas. De Armas reunited with Menkes for the comic Spanish-Venezuelan co-production,
For a Handful of Kisses (2014), which premiered at the Malaga film festival.
Ana de Armas began her shift to a Hollywood career with Eli Roth’s thriller, shot in Chile,
Knock Knock (2015), starring
Keanu Reeves, which was released by
Lionsgate after a
Sundance film festival premiere. Reuniting with Reeves, de Armas co-starred in Lionsgate Premiere’s
Exposed (2016), which was disowned by writer-director Gee Malik Linton, who took his name off the credits instead of the pseudonym Declan Dale.
Co-starring with Edgar Ramirez, Robert De Niro, and Usher, Ana de Armas joined the boxing drama,
Hands of Stone (2016), written and directed by Jonathan Jakubowicz. De Armas’ first Hollywood studio film was director Todd Phillips’ black comedy,
War Dogs (2016), starring Jonah Hill,
Miles Teller, and Bradley Cooper, and released by
Warner Bros.
De Armas’ name was above the title of the Fast and Furious-like
Overdrive (2017), with Scott Eastwood and Freddie Thorp. Becoming a huge hologram, de Armas played the fantasy character of Joi in Denis Villeneuve’s
Blade Runner 2049 (2017), her biggest studio film to date and starring Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Robin Wright, and
Jared Leto. De Armas joined the cast of Joel Kinnaman, Rosamund Pike, Common, and Clive Owen for co-writer/director Andrea Di Stefano’s crime thriller,
The Informer (2019).
For the first time, Ana de Armas was cast by a major film auteur, Olivier Assayas, in the spy thriller about Cuban spies in the U.S.,
Wasp Network (2019), released theatrically and then streaming on
Netflix; it co-starred the impressive roster of Penelope Cruz, Edgar Ramirez, Gael Garcia Bernal, and Wagner Moura. De Armas’ true breakout performance came in writer-producer-director Rian Johnson’s box-office hit,
Knives Out (2019), in which she stood out amidst the starry cast of Daniel Craig,
Chris Evans,
Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Don Johnson, Toni Collette, Lakeith Stanfield, and Christopher Plummer; the murder mystery earned over $311 million worldwide on a $40 million budget.
Ana de Armas was picked by writer-director Michael Cristofer for his crime drama film,
The Night Clerk (2020), starring Tye Sheridan, John Leguizamo, and Helen Hunt, followed by her turn as a supporting “Bond Girl” in
No Time to Die (2021), with Craig in his Bond swan song, and
Lea Seydoux, Rami Malek, Lashana Lynch, Ben Whishaw, Naomie Harris, Jeffrey Wright, Christoph Waltz, and Ralph Fiennes.
It was the second movie in which de Armas played with Craig to earn huge
box-office numbers: Over $774 million worldwide. In 2022, after two streaming productions playing opposite
Ben Affleck (in Adrian Lyne’s
Deep Water for Hulu) and Ryan Gosling (in the action thriller,
The Gray Man, for Netflix), De Armas starred in her biggest role to date as Marilyn Monroe in
Andrew Dominik’s NC-17-rated
Blonde, with
Adrien Brody, Bobby Cannavale, and Julianne Nicholson, premiering at the Venice film festival and theatrically released by Netflix.
De Armas co-starred with
Jude Law,
Vanessa Kirby, Daniel Brühl, and Sydney Sweeney in director/story co-writer/producer
Ron Howard’s true story drama set in the Galapagos Islands,
Eden (2024), premiering at the 2024 edition of the Toronto Film Festival and released in 2025 by Vertical. De Armas landed one of her biggest starring roles to date as star of the fifth movie in the
John Wick franchise,
Ballerina (2025), with
Keanu Reeves, Anjelica Huston, Gabriel Byrne, Lance Reddick, Norman Reedus and Ian McShane, produced by Summit Entertainment/Thunder Road Films/87North Productions for a $90 million budget and released wide by Lionsgate.