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Chasing the dream When Cuban actress Ana de Armas stole the show in the hit movie Knives Out, it was no overnight success, but the product of fifteen years of ambitious effort. Starting at Havana’s famed National Theatre School, de Armas has built a career on two continents, writes Caroline Taylor — and if she has anything to do with it, her biggest roles are yet to come
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he long wait for No Time to Die — the twenty-fifth instalment of the James Bond franchise, now slated to premiere in April 2021 after two pandemic-induced delays — has only increased the anticipation among faithful 007 fans. And many Caribbean fans have a particular curiosity, as the series aptly returns to Jamaica, the place where author Ian Fleming dreamed up the mythic secret agent nearly seventy years ago. Even more aptly, the film has recruited three women of Caribbean heritage for its female leads: Naomie Harris (of Jamaican and Trinidadian parentage), Lashana Lynch (of Jamaican parentage), and Ana de Armas — the Cuban actress whose speedy climb up the Hollywood ladder almost beggars belief. De Armas moved to the United States only in 2014. She didn’t speak any English, and had only ever worked in Spain and Cuba. She’d landed a key Spanishspeaking role in her first studio film — a US and Panamanian co-production called Hands of Stone, with Robert de Niro, Edgar Ramirez, and Usher. On the strength of that, she’d managed to assemble US representation, and — undeterred by casting agents who pilloried her chances of getting quality work because of the language barrier — resolved that it was not going to be her accent that stopped her. “At
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the beginning, it was a disaster,” says de Armas. “Nobody understood what I was saying. I had no clue what I was saying. But I knew emotionally what the scene was about. So my feelings were in the right place; my mouth was going somewhere else.” She followed up Hands of Stone with a string of both Spanish- and English-speaking parts in movies with some of Hollywood’s top talent. Late last year, one of those films saw her receive her first Golden Globe nomination: Knives Out, featuring a stellar ensemble cast including Chris Evans, Daniel Craig, Toni Collette, Christopher Plummer, and Jamie Lee Curtis (who described de Armas’s eyes as “the most expressive eyes [she’d] ever seen”). Ironically, it was a role she nearly didn’t take, when the breakdown described her character as “pretty Latina caretaker.” In 2020, she had two films released preCOVID, with three more delayed until 2021.
