Knives Out was Ana de Armas’s “big break” in the United States, but she’d been working for years when she landed the role. Her costar Jamie Lee Curtis, though, didn’t realize that at the time and now admits she wrongly assumed that de Armas was a Hollywood outsider.
“I assumed—and I say this with real embarrassment—because she had come from Cuba, that she had just arrived. I made an assumption that she was an inexperienced, unsophisticated young woman,” Jamie Lee Curtis confesses in a new profile of the Blonde star in Elle. (To be fair, most of de Armas’s work at the time had been in Cuba and Spain, making her experienced but not in a way Curtis would have necessarily known.) But while Curtis didn’t recognize de Armas’s professional résumé right away, she did recognize her talent.
“That first day, I was like, ‘Oh, what are your dreams?’” Curtis recalls, adding that she wanted to introduce de Armas to Spielberg and the Gyllenhaals, not realizing de Armas already had her own A-list connections—connections she’s using to bolster other women in Hollywood.
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Now a leading lady and a producer, de Armas is open about wanting to diversify the roles she plays and the people she collaborates with. For her upcoming John Wick spin-off Ballerina, she said, “It was really important for me to hire a female writer, because to that point, when I got involved in the project, it was only the director, Len Wiseman, and another guy. And I was like, ‘That’s not going to work.’ So I interviewed, like, five or six female writers. We hired Emerald Fennell, which I was so proud of.”
Inclusive casting is also a concern. “It’s definitely changing; it’s getting better. But it’s hard to know now, being in my position, because I know it’s not the same for everybody,” de Armas says. “And I feel like it’s coming from filmmakers, that diversity has become a must. You have to do the right thing. Thank God.”
