The horrible scene Ana de Armas hated shooting: “I would rather do 100 stunts”
Since breaking through in Hollywood, Cuban-Spanish star Ana de Armas has taken some remarkable risks with her career. Alongside crowd-pleasing action roles alongside icons like James Bond and John Wick in No Time to Die and Ballerina, she has pushed the boundaries of modern on-screen sex in Deep Water and dug deep into her soul to play Marilyn Monroe in Andrew Dominik’s highly controversial Blonde.
However, according to de Armas, none of these films featured anything that terrified her quite like what Hollywood’s safest pair of hands, Ron Howard, forced her to do in Eden. It’s unusual to hear that Howard, known as one of the nicest, most even-tempered directors in Hollywood – when he’s not appearing as his irascible fictional alter-ego in The Studio, of course – would make one of his stars do something they were uncomfortable with, but de Armas was adamant that she was forced to face one of her fears on the film.
Eden is a survival thriller due for release on August 22nd, 2025, after an extended period stuck in limbo following its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. It stars de Armas alongside Jude Law, Sydney Sweeney, Vanessa Kirby, and Daniel Brühl as a group of real-life European settlers who established a colony on Floreana, part of the Galápagos Islands, in 1929.
At one point in the film, the new community gets to know each other, and De Armas was tasked with doing something her character, Baroness Eloise, would think nothing of. However, she baulked when she realised that Howard wanted her to sing in front of her castmates and the entire crew. “I hated it,” she admitted during an appearance on Hot Ones. “I was like, ‘Ron, I really think I should lip sync. This is not for me.’ And he just didn’t want to hear it.”
For Howard, the thought of de Armas lip-syncing to the song was never going to work, because he didn’t want Eloise’s singing to sound pristine. He needed it to sound real and unpolished, so he told de Armas, “No, you’re singing. You’re singing. If you do it bad, it’s good for the character.” De Armas continued to beg him to reconsider, but to her chagrin, he stuck to his guns, and soon she found herself learning the song lyrics.
“It was horrible,” the Knives Out star confessed. “I was terrified. I would rather do 100 stunts than sing that song.” To de Armas, the worst part wasn’t so much that she had to sing, it was that she had to do it in front of people. Perhaps if Howard had offered her the chance to do the scene on a closed set or greenscreen with no one else around, it wouldn’t have been so intimidating, but as it was, she admitted, “I just felt very exposed and vulnerable and it’s not one of my talents for sure.”
In the end, de Armas put her big girl pants on and fought through the discomfort to shoot the scene. When she came out the other side, she revealed it was a great example of pushing herself to be at her “craziest” while playing Eloise. After all, she is a character who swings wildly between “sweet and tender and fragile and nervous and scared” and “absolutely crazy and dangerous”.
Indeed, de Armas ultimately found it was hugely beneficial to have an old hand like Howard at the helm, because she was able to go to him and admit she was nervous about certain scenes as the “out there” character. To her delight, Howard was supportive and excited to see her push her limits as an actor, and she smiled, “There was no question I wanted to do it. I wanted the challenge.”
