Ana de Armas names cinema’s five most iconic action stars: “Unbelievable”
Over the last few years, Ana de Armas has proved that if you’re a bad guy in a movie, you’d be wise to steer well clear of her.
Thanks to face punching, high-kicking, gun-toting movies like the John Wick spin-off Ballerina and the Ryan Gosling action flick The Grey Man, aside from her carnage-inducing cameo in James Bond’s No Time to Die, de Armas has now made it clear that she is not to be trifled with.
Diminutive in stature she may be then, but not in fighting spirit or indeed the courage it took to throw herself into major movies despite not being able to speak a word of English when she first started out in Hollywood about ten years ago.
Anyone who saw her as a giant hologram in another Gosling movie, Blade Runner 2049 is unlikely to forget her in a hurry, she played the digital projection of Gosling’s girlfriend in the film and even in AI form she was able to display her talents far more than in her previous ventures like Keanu Reeves’ Knock Knock in which she had to phonetically learn her lines due to the language barrier.
Producers had seen enough to take a gamble, though, and that paid off with her breakthrough role in Rian Johnson’s whodunnit Knives Out in 2019, a part that brought her considerable acclaim and a Golden Globe nomination for ‘Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical’. She built on that success over the next couple of years with some solid performances in some films that didn’t pull up any trees, but then completely stole the show opposite Daniel Craig as a Bond girl with bite in No Time to Die in 2021.
In a matter of minutes on screen, she blew her way through bad guys, fought henchmen up and down staircases, and all while dressed in a ball gown with a slit up the side. Craig may as well have just been a passenger. And those action credentials were again put to the test in The Grey Man with Gosling and Chris Evans a year later as she played Dani Miranda, the deadly CIA agent. So effective was she that, despite taking on a completely different role in the acclaimed Marilyn Monroe biopic Blonde, which earned her several more award nominations, she was handed the John Wick franchise movie Ballerina last year, to box office success.
Asked which action movie stars had inspired and influenced her down the years, de Armas went for a mix of male and female from different eras of filmmaking, saying: “I think Charlize Theron is someone that I really like watching do what she does because she does beautiful work. Uma Thurman is really amazing too. Tom Cruise is obviously a legend doing all the action in the world and crazy things. There’s no one like him. Sigourney Weaver in Alien is unbelievable.”
Theron has certainly been flying the flag for women leading action movies over the last few years, from 2020’s mercenary superhero film The Old Guard, which spawned a sequel released in July last year, to the super 2017 thriller Atomic Blonde, which saw her playing a no-nonsense spy in Germany during the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
Thurman is, of course, known for her iconic, yellow tracksuited-slashery in the Kill Bill films for Quentin Tarantino, and Weaver blazed a trail for women in movies in the first three Alien movies. Meanwhile, de Armas has got very close to Tom Cruise in the last year or so, but she reserved special praise for her John Wick co-star Keanu Reeves, however, saying: “Obviously, Keanu is in it. I saw him when I was really young, when he did (1994 thriller) Speed just to begin with. So, definitely Keanu.”
Ana de Armas’ top five action movie stars:
- Keanu Reeves
- Charlize Theron
- Tom Cruise
- Sigourney Weaver
- Uma Thurman
