The role Ana de Armas needed to learn English for: “I wasn’t really sure what I was saying”
Even though she was quickly heralded as one of the fastest-rising young stars in Hollywood when she first gained attention in the United States, Ana de Armas had been acting for almost a decade before making her debut in an American production.
Although the Cuban-born actor of Spanish descent may have been unfamiliar to English-speaking audiences until the late 2010s, she was already an experienced performer. De Armas had appeared in plenty of features, short films, and TV shows before being cast in her first English-speaking role, which came with its own set of challenges.
The most notable was that she didn’t speak it, not that it prevented her from finding an agent in Hollywood. It wasn’t long before the casting calls started coming thick and fast, too, placing her in a situation where she was working with one of the biggest names in the industry despite being unsure of what the lines of dialogue she was reciting even meant.
It was a completely forgettable flick that bombed at the box office, but Eli Roth’s psychosexual thriller Knock Knock will always be remembered as de Armas’ introduction to American cinema. She smouldered opposite Lorenza Izzo as a pair of sultry home invaders who give Keanu Reeves’ architect more than he bargained for when he welcomes them in, even if the script didn’t mean a whole lot.
“I learned it phonetically,” de Armas admitted to The Hollywood Reporter of the unusual nature of her maiden Stateside production. “I wasn’t really sure what I was saying.” That might have been for the best because the screenplay was hardly anything to celebrate, even if it did prove beneficial in the long run by allowing her to get to grips with acting in a language other than her own.
Hardly the most memorable of debuts, but Knock Knock was merely a springboard to much bigger and better things. Within the space of a few years, de Armas had worked with Miles Teller and Jonah Hill in War Dogs, been cast in Denis Villeneuve’s legacy sequel Blade Runner 2049, and earned a Golden Globe nomination for her work in Rian Johnson’s whodunit, Knives Out.
She’s since gone on to steal every one of her scenes in Daniel Craig’s James Bond swansong No Time to Die and landed an Academy Award nomination for embodying Marilyn Monroe in the Netflix biopic Blonde, which began shooting less than five years after she’d reported to the set of Knock Knock without being able to speak English.
Fittingly, Reeves has become the barometer of just how quickly her star has risen. Ten years after they first shared the screen in Roth’s turgid genre film, they’ll cross paths once again under very different circumstances when the John Wick frontman makes a cameo appearance in the spinoff Ballerina, which places de Armas front and centre as the lead of her own gun-toting action blockbuster.
