‘Blonde’ Star Ana de Armas on Getting to Know Marilyn Monroe

variety.com:

Liza Foreman When Cuban-Spanish actor Ana de Armas was asked to play Marilyn Monroe in Andrew Dominik’s Netflix feature “Blonde,” she spent months preparing and studying for the role. “It was very important to discover the real woman and bring all of those elements together,” she said Saturday at the San Sebastian Film Festival. “My idea of Marilyn in the past was quite elementary,” she said at a press conference. “I knew her films and little more.

To get to know her story was fascinating for me. She represented the dream that we all want to be. So what could go so wrong?

I now respect her much more, and understand her better and could humanize her much more, and give her more credit for the effort she put into things.” Produced by Plan B and distributed by Netflix, the film is based on the bestselling novel by Joyce Carol Oates, who reimagines the life of Monroe.

The film explores the split between her public and private self. Dominik said: “The idea is to give you her life experience.” It’s also about giving a new spin to the collective memory, which he did by trying to create different associations with iconic images. “The advantage of doing that with someone so photographed is that you have so many images that have meaning that you can now give them a new meaning,” he said. “But this is probably some people’s objections to the film because we are screwing around with people’s memories.” De Armas added: “In all of the recreations, what we recreated, from Andrew’s point of view, was to show the other side of what she saw.