Ana de Armas’ unique way of preparing for an action scene: “Rev herself up like it’s a V8 engine”
“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” might be something of an outmoded phrase these days, but you can’t deny it makes for some amazing action movies. From the late 1970s, when Sigourney Weaver single-handedly took on a horde of human-hungry aliens to Uma Thurman slicing and dicing in Kill Bill: Volume One, women have been taking on all-comers on screen in fearsome fashion for decades.
Ana de Armas is the latest to pick up the baton (and the knife, and the gun) as she takes the lead in From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, a spin-off that sees her battle an army of killers while seeking revenge for the death of her father.
It is not de Armas’ first foray into a traditionally male-dominated action franchise. She already lit up the screen opposite Daniel Craig in the 2021 James Bond film No Time to Die, in which she showed herself more than a match for 007 in the bad guy fighting stakes, before she starred in a similar role as a CIA operative in 2022’s Ryan Gosling action flick, The Gray Man.
Her rise has been fairly meteoric for someone who could barely speak or understand English a decade or so ago. After some scene-stealing turns as an AI hologram in Ridley Scott’s futuristic Blade Runner 2049, de Armas was cast alongside Keanu Reeves in a 2015 Eli Roth thriller called Knock Knock.
Another film with Reeves followed the next year, before she took a role in her first action thriller opposite Scott Eastwood in Overdrive. It was her performance in the smash-hit whodunnit comedy Knives Out that really brought her to attention as the novelist Harlan Thrombey’s nurse Marta Cabrera, for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe.
After that film, she found herself very much in demand with casting directors and began to find a niche as a genuine action star. It’s something her co-stars and directors are very aware of, with her Ballerina director Len Wiseman waxing lyrical about her presence and preparation, saying, “Ana does this thing where she’ll rev herself up like it’s a V8 engine where she’s just screaming in the corner before she does a fight. It got to a point where at first it was like, ‘What’s going on?’… A lot of times it falls on me to rev the person up and I’m totally prepared to do it. But when you’ve got somebody that, as we’re getting ready for it, they’re screaming in the corner, you’re like, ‘OK we’re ready’.”
She had to endure months of training in freezing temperatures in addition to gruelling fight scenes in her role as assassin Eve Macarro, adding, “In a movie like this, when you’re doing action and you’re so exhausted and things just keep by nature getting harder and harder and harder, you have to push through.”
She noted how the preparation was an onslaught on her mental self and physical body, especially due to the extremes of temperature, explaining the need to scream: “It’s hard to warm up in winter in Budapest. So I would just start jumping and screaming to the top of my lungs before every take. And some of the sequences would be shooting for a whole week, and you have to pick it up where you left it yesterday, and you have to be equally exhausted and sweating and hurting and, you know, that is the performance.”
Ballerina has been warmly received, with audiences praising de Armas’ work as “lethal and graceful” and critics describing the action scenes as “creatively brutal”. Next up she will be starring alongside Oscar Isaac in an Apple TV+ series that’s tentatively titled Bananas.
