Ana de Armas: From Havana to Blonde, and the Price of a Hollywood Body

When we wrote about her in May 2022, the headline was simple: "Ana de Armas stars in the most expensive Netflix movie." That movie was The Gray Man, and the erotic side of her career was a single line: "This year, the actress starred in an erotic thriller alongside American actor Ben Affleck." At the time, Blonde was finished but still had no release date.

Four years later, the picture has changed. Blonde came out with an NC-17 rating and earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Actress; Ballerina made her the lead of a John Wick spin-off; and in 2026 she was announced for another erotic thriller, Palm Grove, opposite Kate Hudson. So it is time to ask the question her career keeps raising: from the Spanish youth films to Knock Knock, Deep Water and Blonde, were her love and nude scenes her ticket to Hollywood, or did she reach the top in spite of them?

Who Is Ana de Armas?

Category: biography, Havana, early career, Spain

Ana de Armas is a Cuban-Spanish actress born on 30 April 1988 in Havana. She joined Havana's National Theatre of Cuba at 14, made her first film in Cuba, and moved to Madrid at 18 on Spanish citizenship inherited from her maternal grandparents. Spanish TV made her famous before Hollywood did.

Born Ana Celia de Armas Caso, she grew up in Cuba with little exposure to popular culture beyond the island, according to her Wikipedia biography and the interviews it cites. In 2002, aged 14, she auditioned successfully for Havana's National Theatre of Cuba. Her first film role came while she was still a teenager in Cuba: Una rosa de Francia, directed by Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón.

Her maternal grandparents were Spanish immigrants to Cuba, and through them she held Spanish citizenship. At 18 she used it to move to Madrid. Soon after arriving she met the casting director Luis San Narciso, and before long she was starring in the boarding-school mystery series El Internado (2007–2010), the series that, as we wrote in 2022, "catapulted her career". She now holds Cuban, Spanish and American citizenship.

That Spanish chapter, with its youth comedies and historical TV, is where her screen sensuality was first put on display, and it is where the question of this article really begins.

Spain: El Internado, Mentiras y gordas and Por un puñado de besos

Category: Spanish career, El Internado, Mentiras y gordas, Hispania, Por un puñado de besos

Spain made Ana de Armas a star. The boarding-school series El Internado made her famous, the youth film Mentiras y gordas (2009) topped the Spanish box office, Hispania put her in a historical epic, and Por un puñado de besos (2014) sold her as a romantic lead whose beauty was part of the pitch. Critics were harsh on the films, but they made her bankable.

El Internado: Carolina

Soon after arriving in Madrid, she was cast as Carolina Leal in El Internado, a mystery series set in a boarding school. She played the role for six seasons, from 2007 to 2010. According to her Wikipedia biography, the show became popular with viewers and made her a celebrity in Spain, giving her the young fan base that her next film was aimed at.

Mentiras y gordas (2009): Sex, Drugs and a Box-Office Hit

Mentiras y gordas, released in English as Sex, Party and Lies, was directed by Alfonso Albacete and David Menkes and opened in Spain on 27 March 2009, when de Armas was 20. She plays Carola in an ensemble cast drawn from the hit youth series of the day, including Mario Casas, Yon González and Hugo Silva. As Spanish Wikipedia summarises it, the film follows a group of young people through a summer of clubs and parties, a whirl of secrets, lies, hook-ups, sex, alcohol and drugs that ends in tragedy.

Commercially it worked. El País reported that it opened at number one, with €1.7 million and nearly 300,000 admissions in its first weekend, ahead of Almodóvar's Los abrazos rotos. The critics were far less kind. Jordi Costa of El País called it "una mirada coral y enfebrecida a las transacciones químico-venéreas de una juventud en caída libre" (a feverish ensemble look at the chemical and venereal transactions of a youth in free fall), and Carlos Boyero called its script "bochornoso" (shameful), both cited by Spanish Wikipedia. The film traded on youth, sex and its stars' looks, and it showed the Spanish industry that de Armas could pull an audience.

Hispania, la leyenda (2010–2011)

After a few months in New York learning English, she returned to Spain for Hispania, la leyenda. The historical drama retells Viriathus's resistance against the Roman conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, and she played Nerea in 17 episodes. It was a prestige costume role, a step away from the party-film image.

Por un puñado de besos (2014)

Her last Spanish lead before Hollywood reunited her with David Menkes. Por un puñado de besos, adapted from a novel by Jordi Sierra i Fabra, opened in Spain on 16 May 2014, with Martiño Rivas as her co-star. She was 26. The film is a romantic drama about illness, the fear of death and love. Reviewing it for El País, Javier Ocaña dismissed it as "inferior, indigno, superficial" and argued that it leaned on "la evidente belleza de Ana de Armas y Martiño Rivas" (the obvious beauty of Ana de Armas and Martiño Rivas). He also noted, pointedly, that "no parece casualidad" (it doesn't seem a coincidence) that Rivas's shirts come off at the slightest opportunity and that within the first minute de Armas is already glimpsed in fine lingerie. In other words, the sensuality was part of the marketing, aimed at the young audience Mentiras y gordas had found.

Leaving Spain

She has been frank that Spain was both a refuge and a place she had to leave behind. "My grandparents were Spanish, so I had a dual passport—it was the only way I had to get out," she told Vanity Fair in 2016. On the move to Los Angeles, she said: "Moving to L.A. was hard. I had a career in Spain, and you have to forget your ego. I was a nobody again." The Spanish films had made her a star; they did not make her a Hollywood one.

Knock Knock: The Eli Roth Breakout

Category: Knock Knock, Eli Roth, Keanu Reeves, Death Game remake, erotic thriller

Knock Knock (2015) was Ana de Armas' first Hollywood film. In Eli Roth's erotic thriller she plays Bel, one of two young women who seduce and then torment a married architect played by Keanu Reeves. It premiered at Sundance in January 2015, when she was 26, and grossed less than its budget. Still, it put her face and body in front of American audiences for the first time, which is why the "ticket to Hollywood" question starts here.

The Film and the Plot

Knock Knock was directed by Eli Roth, who co-wrote it with Guillermo Amoedo and Nicolás López, and shot in Santiago de Chile. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on 23 January 2015, and Lionsgate Premiere released it in the US on 9 October 2015. Reeves plays Evan Webber, an architect left alone at home over Father's Day weekend. On a stormy night, two soaked young women, Genesis (Lorenza Izzo) and Bel (de Armas), knock on his door asking for help. He lets them in to dry off; they flirt, push his boundaries and seduce him. The next morning they refuse to leave, wreck his wife's art and his home, sexually assault him while he is tied to the bed, and stage a "game" designed to destroy married men who cheat.

A Remake of Death Game

The film is a remake of Peter S. Traynor's Death Game (shot in 1974, released in 1977), which starred Sondra Locke and Colleen Camp. The original isn't credited as the source of the screenplay, but as Variety's Ben Kenigsberg wrote, it is "by any reasonable definition, a remake". He also noted that Camp "has a small role and serves as producer", playing Evan's physical therapist, Vivian, while Locke and Traynor received executive producer credits. Camp, who has bridged that 1970s exploitation film and today's Hollywood, will get her own Meeting Venus feature soon.

The Seduction Scenes

The film's sex appeal is front-loaded and calculated. The two women arrive dripping wet; Evan gives them robes and puts their clothes in the dryer, and what follows is a slow, teasing seduction. When their Uber arrives they slip into the bathroom, where he finds them naked, and after rejecting them more than once he gives in to a threesome. The Hollywood Reporter called it "the latest titillation-fueled thriller from Eli Roth", describing the women "bending over strategically, cooing over their host's biceps and his record collection". Variety observed that Roth and his co-writers "tease out the flirtation more patiently than Traynor did".

In de Armas' scenes the camera treats her body as bait: the sensuality is the trap the plot springs. Once the game turns violent, the film loses interest in desire and becomes a home-invasion satire. The film's US R rating cites "Nudity" and "Strong Sexual Content", as Rotten Tomatoes lists it.

The Reviews

Critics were divided. Variety called it a "glossy and reasonably fun update" of the 1977 film. In The Guardian, Mike McCahill summed it up as a "sick joke" that has "been very shrewdly constructed". The Hollywood Reporter found that "Izzo and de Armas' performances grow increasingly difficult to believe as the characters become violent", and complained that the script never explains their sadism. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus faulted its "repetitive story or misguidedly campy tone".

Lines Learned Phonetically

De Armas made the film before she could speak English. "I learned it phonetically," she told The Hollywood Reporter. "I wasn't really sure what I was saying." She described how she learned English afterwards to Vanity Fair in 2020: "People ask, 'How did you learn English so quickly?' I'm like, 'Because my life depended on it.'"

The Box Office and What It Opened

Commercially, Knock Knock grossed about $6.3 million against a $10 million budget, according to Wikipedia. It was not a hit, but it was a door. Ten years later she reunited with Reeves in the John Wick spin-off Ballerina; AP called it "a full-circle moment". Whether the seductress of Knock Knock was the role that got her noticed, or simply the one she had to get through, is a question best answered later, once the whole career is in view.

From Joi to Paloma: Blade Runner 2049, Knives Out and No Time to Die

Category: Hollywood career, Blade Runner 2049, Knives Out, No Time to Die, War Dogs, Hands of Stone

The roles that made Ana de Armas a Hollywood star were mostly clothed ones: Joi, the holographic girlfriend in Blade Runner 2049 (2017); Marta, the nurse in Knives Out (2019), which earned her a Golden Globe nomination; and Paloma, the scene-stealing CIA agent in No Time to Die (2021). Critics praised warmth, goodness and wit, not her body.

Stepping Stones: Hands of Stone and War Dogs (2016)

Two 2016 films came before the breakthrough. Hands of Stone, Jonathan Jakubowicz's biopic of the boxer Roberto Durán, was the first Hollywood film she shot, though it was released later; Jakubowicz had seen her in El Internado. She played Durán's wife opposite Édgar Ramírez. Reviewing it for RogerEbert.com, Christy Lemire found her "a hugely charismatic presence. But except for a couple of showy moments, she gets little to do besides function as the dutiful wife," as her Wikipedia biography quotes. In Todd Phillips's War Dogs she was Miles Teller's partner, again speaking lines learned phonetically. David Ehrlich of IndieWire called her "memorable in a thankless role". Even then she pushed back on the wife-and-girlfriend label: "I know it sounds like I'm playing all these wives and girlfriends, but they're not waiting at home. I wear the pants," she told Vanity Fair.

Blade Runner 2049: Joi

In Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049 she plays Joi, a holographic AI who is the live-in companion of Ryan Gosling's blade runner, K. She was 29. It is a love story with no body at its centre, and that is its erotic paradox. In The New Yorker, Anthony Lane called her "wondrous": "whenever Joi appears, the movie's imaginative heart begins to race." He noted how she switches outfits "in a shimmer—a vision that smacks of servility, except that it's he who seems beholden to her." In The Guardian, Mark Kermode wrote that she "brings three-dimensional warmth to a character who is essentially a digital projection." IndieWire called her "the film's biggest find" and declared it her "breakout role".

The film's one love scene is also its strangest. To be able to sleep with K, Joi hires Mariette (Mackenzie Davis), a replicant sex worker, and syncs her projected image over Mariette's body. The two women's faces and limbs drift in and out of alignment, so that K makes love to a woman who is two women at once. It is less a sex scene than an essay on desire and simulation: the male fantasy of the perfect, programmable girlfriend has to borrow a real body, and the seams show. De Armas gives Joi a longing that makes the scene sad rather than titillating, and it raised her profile far more than Knock Knock's nudity had, even though the film itself underperformed commercially.

Knives Out: Marta

The true breakthrough was Rian Johnson's Knives Out (2019), in which she plays Marta Cabrera, the immigrant nurse at the centre of a family murder mystery. She was 31. At first she didn't want to audition because the character description called Marta a "pretty Latina caretaker"; once she read the script, she told The Hollywood Reporter, "I realized that the description didn't fit at all because Marta is so much more than that." In The Times, Tom Shone wrote that "the film's standout performance comes from its least well-known member, the Cuban de Armas, who manages the difficult task of making goodness interesting." She earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, and the film was a major box-office hit, passing $300 million worldwide according to Variety.

No Time to Die: Paloma

Paloma, the Cuban CIA agent in Cary Joji Fukunaga's No Time to Die (2021), was written with de Armas in mind, reuniting her with her Knives Out co-star Daniel Craig. She was 33. Paloma claims to have little training, then proves highly skilled in a fight. De Armas described the character as bubbly and "very irresponsible". In The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw praised her "witty and unworldly turn". The role lasts only a few minutes, in a film that grossed $774.2 million worldwide. Paloma is a Bond woman who flirts but never ends up in bed with Bond.

That is the key to the argument. Between 2017 and 2021 the roles that made her a star asked for charm, intelligence and comic timing. The love scenes were few, and the nudity was minimal. Hollywood had promoted her from seductress to leading lady before Deep Water and Blonde put her body back at the centre.

Deep Water and The Gray Man: The 2022 We Wrote About

Category: Deep Water, Adrian Lyne, Ben Affleck, The Gray Man, 2022

2022 gave Ana de Armas two big releases and two disappointments. Deep Water, Adrian Lyne's first film in 20 years, went straight to streaming in March and drew mixed reviews for its sex and its marital games with Ben Affleck. The Gray Man, Netflix's $200 million spy thriller, turned her into an action co-star but got lukewarm reviews. Neither made her bigger; that would take Blonde.

When we wrote about her in May 2022, those two films were the story: "This year, the actress starred in an erotic thriller alongside American actor Ben Affleck," and our headline was that "Ana de Armas stars in the most expensive Netflix movie." Four years on, both look less like career peaks than detours.

Deep Water: Lyne Returns, Straight to Streaming

Deep Water adapts Patricia Highsmith's 1957 novel, with a screenplay by Zach Helm and Sam Levinson. It was Lyne's first film since Unfaithful in 2002, as IndieWire noted, from the director of 9½ Weeks, Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal. After several pandemic delays it skipped cinemas: it was released on 18 March 2022, on Hulu in the US and Prime Video internationally. De Armas, 33 at its release, plays Melinda Van Allen. She is in an open marriage with Affleck's Vic, takes lovers openly, even in the family home, and uses them to provoke her husband's jealousy, while the men around her begin to disappear.

The Love Scenes

The sex in Deep Water is less about Melinda's pleasure than about being watched. Lyne explained the idea to The A.V. Club: "Jealousy obviously is an aphrodisiac," and Melinda is "not only doing it for herself... she's doing it for him as well. So when he looks through that window at the beginning, she kind of knows he'll be watching." Her flirtations with younger men are staged for Vic, and the rare moments of real desire between husband and wife are charged by everything that came before. It is classic Lyne, voyeurism as marriage, with sex used as a weapon as much as a pleasure.

Lyne was not comfortable with the new rules for filming intimacy. "It implies a lack of trust, which I loathed," he told The Independent of the intimacy coordinator on set. "That's all I have with my actors – they trust me and I trust them, totally. It wasn't a big deal in the end, though." He told CinemaBlend that the coordinator "was outside looking at the monitor. She wasn't on the set." De Armas's worry, by Lyne's account to CinemaBlend, was the character rather than the nudity: "She would say quite often during the shooting, she would say, 'They're gonna hate me! They're gonna hate me!'"

The critics did not hate her, but they didn't love the film. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus judged that "viewers desperately seeking a new erotic thriller might find Deep Water worth a dip, but it's far from director Adrian Lyne's best work." In The Hollywood Reporter, David Rooney wrote that Lyne's version "manages to drain all the subtlety and psychological complexity from Highsmith's story of marital warfare, transgression and obsession."

De Armas and Affleck

The film's chemistry was not only on screen. Lyne told The Independent that he sensed their attraction at the first screen test, filmed at his home in Los Angeles: "There was a sweetness between them but with an edge." According to her Wikipedia biography, de Armas and Affleck met on the set in late 2019 and dated from March 2020 to January 2021, more than a year before the film came out. The relationship was over before audiences saw them together.

The Gray Man: Dani Miranda

Four months later came The Gray Man, directed by Anthony and Joe Russo from Mark Greaney's 2009 novel. De Armas plays Dani Miranda, the CIA agent who teams up with Ryan Gosling's Sierra Six against Chris Evans's psychopathic Lloyd Hansen, reuniting her with both her Blade Runner 2049 and her Knives Out co-stars. With a budget reported at over $200 million, it is one of Netflix's most expensive original films. It opened in limited cinemas on 15 July 2022 and on Netflix on 22 July. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus summed up the response: it "has the star-studded outline of an entertaining action thriller, but it's filled in with lukewarm leftovers from far better films." It was a clothed, physical role, and it pointed toward the action career that would lead to Ballerina.

Blonde: NC-17, Marilyn and the Oscar Nomination

Category: Blonde, Andrew Dominik, Marilyn Monroe, NC-17, Netflix, Oscar nomination

Blonde (2022) is the film in which Ana de Armas' nudity and her acclaim collided. Andrew Dominik's NC-17 Marilyn Monroe film, adapted from Joyce Carol Oates' novel, became the first NC-17 film released exclusively on a streaming service. Critics called it exploitative, and it won the Razzie for Worst Picture. It also earned her Oscar, SAG and BAFTA nominations for Best Actress.

The Film

Blonde is Dominik's adaptation of Oates' 2000 novel, a fictionalised and controversial account of Monroe's life that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist; Dominik called the book "pretty much the bible for the film." Filming began on 4 August 2019, the anniversary of Monroe's death, when de Armas was 31. After long post-production delays, it premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival on 8 September 2022 to a long standing ovation, opened in limited US cinemas on 16 September and began streaming on Netflix on 28 September. She was 34.

The NC-17

Before the rating was confirmed, Dominik dismissed rumours of an NC-17 as "horsesh*t", as IndieWire reported in February 2022. By May, Variety was reporting that he was "surprised" by the adults-only rating for the film's sexual content, and predicting the film would "offend everyone". It became the first NC-17 film released exclusively to a streaming service. Dominik was defiant: "It's a demanding movie—it is what it is, it says what it says. And if the audience doesn't like it, that's the fucking audience's problem," he told Screen Daily, adding that an episode of Euphoria is "far more graphic than anything going on in Blonde." De Armas agreed, as IndieWire reported from her L'Officiel interview: "I can tell you a number of shows or movies that are way more explicit with a lot more sexual content than 'Blonde.'" In GQ, Keith Phipps argued that the rating's commercial stigma vanishes on streaming, so Blonde "could be a sign of things to come" (a shift explored in this deep dive into nudity and sex on streaming services).

The Nudity and the Controversial Scenes

IndieWire noted that de Armas "bares all for the film, emotionally and physically, spending long sequences topless and, at one point, fully nude." The body is the film's subject, and its problem. The film depicts Monroe being sexually abused by powerful men, including a fictionalised studio head and a fictionalised president, and EW reported that the scene with the president had "already resulted in a rare NC-17 rating".

The abortion scenes caused a separate storm. Monroe is pregnant, changes her mind on the day, and her pleas are ignored. Later a computer-generated fetus speaks to her. Planned Parenthood accused the film of anti-abortion propaganda, and The Verge called the fetus "anti-abortion propaganda dressed up as art". The historian Michelle Vogel noted that there is no evidence Monroe ever had an abortion; she suffered documented miscarriages during her marriage to Arthur Miller. Dominik denied that the film is anti-abortion.

"I Was in Control"

De Armas has defended the nudity as her choice. "It's harder for people to watch [those scenes] than for me to make them, because I understood what I was doing and I felt very protected and safe," she told Entertainment Weekly. "I didn't feel exploited because I was in control. I made that decision. I knew what the movie I was doing. I trusted my director." On how the scenes were filmed, she said: "We had an intimacy coordinator with us all the time, and she was very helpful… I knew exactly what the shot was going to be. I knew exactly what was going to be seen, what was not going to be seen." The coordinator Jean Franzblau later recalled to Business Insider that the job was "trial by fire". De Armas also told Variety: "I did things in this movie I would have never done for anyone else, ever. I did it for her, and I did it for Andrew."

Exploitation or Tribute?

The critics split, but most reserved their praise for her. Oates, who saw a rough cut, called it "startling, brilliant, very disturbing and perhaps most surprisingly an utterly 'feminist' interpretation." In Variety, Owen Gleiberman called her work "a performance ... of breathtaking shimmer and imagination and candor and heartbreak." Against it, in The New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote that "once again a director is more interested in examining [Monroe's] body (literally, in this case) than getting inside her mind," and called it "the latest necrophiliac entertainment to exploit her." In Time, Stephanie Zacharek complained that "Marilyn—the brilliant, perceptive if often difficult performer—is almost nowhere to be seen in Andrew Dominik's willfully clueless Freudian fantasy." The Rotten Tomatoes consensus caught the paradox: "Ana de Armas' luminous performance makes it difficult to look away, but Blonde can be hard to watch as it teeters between commenting on exploitation and contributing to it."

The Accent

When the trailers appeared, some viewers objected that a Cuban actress still had her accent as an American icon. Dominik admitted to Screen Daily that there was "work involved" in making her "sound American". The Monroe estate defended the casting, calling Monroe "a singular Hollywood and pop culture icon that transcends generations and history."

The Oscar and the Razzie

Few films have had a stranger awards season. Blonde won Worst Picture and Worst Screenplay at the 43rd Golden Raspberry Awards. De Armas was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress, the first Cuban-born actress nominated in the category, along with SAG and BAFTA nominations. A film widely condemned for exploiting a woman's body earned the woman playing her the most prestigious recognition of her career.

Love and Nude Scenes: Was This Her Ticket to Hollywood?

Category: love scenes, nude scenes, Knock Knock, Deep Water, Blonde, Hollywood career

Not really. Her love and nude scenes opened doors, but they did not make her a star. Knock Knock's erotic thriller gave Ana de Armas her first English-language role, but her breakthroughs (Blade Runner 2049, Knives Out, No Time to Die) were not built on nudity. Her nudest role, Blonde, came after she was already established. It brought her an Oscar nomination, along with the circulating nude clips she predicted and called "disgusting".

Spain: Sensuality as Marketing

Her screen career began in Cuba while she was still a teenager, but the sensual image was a product of Spain. On El Internado, a boarding-school mystery for a young audience, she became a celebrity in Spain, but not yet a sex symbol. The sex came with Mentiras y gordas (2009), released when she was 20: an ensemble youth film of parties, sex and drugs that topped the Spanish box office. Five years later, El País critic Javier Ocaña argued that Por un puñado de besos (2014) leaned on "la evidente belleza de Ana de Armas" (the obvious beauty of Ana de Armas), showing her in lingerie from its opening minute. In Spain, her body was part of the sales pitch for youth cinema.

Knock Knock: The Door Opens

Her American debut was the most overtly sexual role of her early career. In Eli Roth's Knock Knock (2015), she and Lorenza Izzo play the young women who seduce Keanu Reeves's married architect into a threesome and then turn on him. The Hollywood Reporter called it a "titillation-fueled thriller", and the US R rating cites nudity and strong sexual content. She learned her lines phonetically. It was a door into Hollywood, but the film grossed less than its budget, and it did not make her a name.

Hands of Stone and War Dogs: Wives and Girlfriends

The 2016 films cast her as a boxer's wife and an arms dealer's partner. The reviews checked for this article do not single out love or nude scenes in either; critics wrote about how little the roles gave her. "I know it sounds like I'm playing all these wives and girlfriends, but they're not waiting at home. I wear the pants," she told Vanity Fair.

Blade Runner 2049: Desire Without a Body

Her breakthrough love scene has no body of her own in it. As the hologram Joi, she syncs her image over Mariette (Mackenzie Davis), a replicant sex worker, to make love to Ryan Gosling's K. The scene is about longing and simulation more than sex, and critics praised her warmth, not her body: Mark Kermode wrote in The Guardian that she "brings three-dimensional warmth to a character who is essentially a digital projection." Then came Knives Out and No Time to Die, clothed roles that made her a leading lady.

Deep Water: The Erotic Thriller as a Star Vehicle

By the time of Adrian Lyne's Deep Water (2022), she was a Golden Globe nominee and a Bond woman, and the erotic thriller was a star vehicle, not an audition. Her Melinda uses sex to provoke her husband's jealousy, and Lyne described her as "doing it for him as well". Her worry on set, by Lyne's account, was that audiences would "hate" the character. The film was released straight to streaming to mixed reviews and did little to move her career forward.

Blonde: The Nudest Role and the Biggest Prize

Blonde was the film in which her nudity was most extensive, and it was rated NC-17. It was also the role that brought her an Oscar nomination. She was clear about what would happen to the images outside the film. "I know what's going to go viral, and it's disgusting," she told Variety in her September 2022 cover story. "It's upsetting just to think about it. I can't control it; you can't really control what they do and how they take things out of context. I don't think it gave me second thoughts; it just gave me a bad taste to think about the future of those clips." IndieWire linked that fear to how her nudity in Knock Knock had already gone viral.

The Verdict

The evidence points one way. Knock Knock was her ticket in: an erotic thriller gave a Cuban actress who barely spoke English her first English-language role, and the role was built on seduction. But a ticket in is not a ticket up. The film grossed less than its budget, and the roles that made her a star (Joi, Marta, Paloma) are defined by warmth, wit and goodness, with little or no nudity. Hollywood promoted her for her talent and charisma, not her body.

Her later nude roles reverse the usual story. The familiar pattern is to undress to get noticed and to cover up once a star. De Armas did the opposite: she took on Deep Water and Blonde when she already had the power to choose. Blonde's nudity and its Oscar nomination arrived together, but the nomination was for a performance critics praised even when they condemned the film. If her body was ever the ticket, it was the ticket into Hollywood's lobby, not onto its stage. Her move into action leads such as Ballerina shows the career no longer needs it.

After Blonde: Ghosted, Eden and Ballerina

Category: Ghosted, Eden, Ballerina, John Wick, action star, producer

After Blonde, Ana de Armas stopped being only a face on the poster and started producing her films. She was an executive producer of Ghosted (2023), the Apple TV+ action comedy with Chris Evans, and a producer of Ron Howard's Eden (2024) and of Ballerina (2025), the John Wick spin-off that made her an action lead. Ballerina grossed about $140 million worldwide. The Oscar nominee had become an action star.

Ghosted (2023): Panned, but Watched

In Ghosted, directed by Dexter Fletcher, she replaced Scarlett Johansson, who left over a scheduling conflict, and reunited with her Knives Out and The Gray Man co-star Chris Evans. She plays Sadie Rhodes, a CIA operative whose first date turns into a globe-trotting rescue mission, and she is also credited as an executive producer. Apple TV+ released it on 21 April 2023. The reviews were bad; The Guardian's headline called it a "dreadful big star action comedy" that "deserves to be ignored", and she was nominated for two Razzies: Worst Actress, and Worst Screen Combo with Evans. Still, it was reported as Apple TV+'s most-watched film debut. The sex symbol of Blonde was now playing the agent who rescues the man.

Eden (2024): The Baroness

In Ron Howard's Eden, a survival thriller based on the true story of European settlers on Floreana in the Galápagos in the early 1930s, she plays the self-styled Baroness Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn and is also one of the producers. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on 7 September 2024 and opened in US cinemas through Vertical on 22 August 2025. The Baroness is her most openly sexual role since Blonde, but here she controls the desire rather than suffering it. In The Playlist's description, she "uses her sexual bravado to make men spin around her like tops", arrives with two young lovers and plays them against each other. Screen Daily's Tim Grierson wrote that she "gives the picture a wicked jolt, playing this character as a flirty schemer who enjoys charming the men around her." In Variety, Owen Gleiberman was cooler: "for a while you can feel the movie come alive when she's onscreen," though "even de Armas's hauteur starts to wear thin." Commercially it failed, with a reported gross of about $2.8 million.

Ballerina (2025): The Action Lead

Ballerina, directed by Len Wiseman, is set within the John Wick universe. She plays Eve Macarro, a Ruska Roma-trained assassin seeking revenge for her father's murder, and she shares a producer credit with Keanu Reeves, ten years after Knock Knock. Lionsgate released it on 6 June 2025, a year later than first planned, and it grossed about $140 million worldwide. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus credited "a steely Ana de Armas with creatively brutal action choreography." Wiseman told IndieWire that the fights were built around her: "I'd get updates saying things like, 'Ana is really good at kicks.'"

She has described the transformation in physical terms. "The training was three to four months, every day, many hours a day – combat training, handling weapons... All of a sudden, I was training like an athlete," she told The Straits Times. And to UPI: "I never thought I was going to do action. I didn't think I was athletic enough or strong enough... Now I definitely love it and I enjoy it very much."

From Body to Brand

The three films trace the shift at the heart of this article. In Knock Knock and Blonde her body was the subject; in Ballerina it is a weapon, trained, protected and choreographed around her strengths. In Eden she still plays a seductress, but as a producer and a star who chooses the role. By 2025, the actress who in 2022 had called the circulation of her nude clips "disgusting" was producing a John Wick spin-off that took about $140 million at the box office.

After Blonde: Ghosted, Eden and Ballerina

Category: Ghosted, Eden, Ballerina, John Wick, action star, producer

Ghosted (2023): Panned, but Watched

Eden (2024): The Baroness

Ballerina (2025): The Action Lead

From Body to Brand

Conclusion: Did Nudity Make Ana de Armas a Star?

Category: Ana de Armas, conclusion, Knock Knock, Blonde, ticket to Hollywood

No. Nudity opened the door, but talent kept her inside. Knock Knock, an erotic thriller, gave Ana de Armas her first English-language role, but her star was made by roles in which she remained clothed: Joi in Blade Runner 2049, Marta in Knives Out and Paloma in No Time to Die. Deep Water and Blonde came after she was established, on her own terms, and Blonde brought her an Oscar nomination.

In our May 2022 post we wrote that "Ana de Armas stars in the most expensive Netflix movie" and that "this year, the actress starred in an erotic thriller alongside American actor Ben Affleck." At the time, Blonde had no release date. Four years later, the story is clearer. The girl who left Havana for Madrid at 18 used Spanish youth comedies and an Eli Roth thriller as a way in. Then she earned the A-list through precision, wit and a voice she learned to use in a second language.

What makes her career unusual is the order. Most actresses are asked to undress early and are allowed to cover up later. De Armas made her most exposed films, Deep Water and Blonde, when she already had the power to refuse them, and she defended them as choices. Blonde was condemned as exploitation and celebrated as a performance, often in the same breath, and that double reaction is the price of a Hollywood body. With Palm Grove on the horizon, she may return to the erotic thriller once more, this time as the name that sells it.

FAQ About Ana de Armas

How old is Ana de Armas?

Ana de Armas is 38 years old. She was born on 30 April 1988 in Havana, Cuba, and holds Cuban and Spanish citizenship.

What happened to Ana de Armas when she was 18?

At 18, Ana de Armas left Cuba and moved to Madrid, using the Spanish citizenship she inherited from her maternal grandparents. Soon after arriving, she was cast as Carolina Leal in the Spanish series El Internado, which made her famous in Spain.

What was Ana de Armas' first Hollywood movie?

Her first Hollywood movie was Knock Knock (2015), Eli Roth's erotic thriller with Keanu Reeves, which she made while still learning English. The film is a remake of the 1977 thriller Death Game.

What is Ana de Armas' next movie?

As of October 2026, none of Ana de Armas' upcoming projects has a confirmed release date. Her upcoming projects include Sweat, a psychological thriller directed by J Blakeson; the Apple TV spy series Safe Houses; Impunity, a Pinochet-era thriller with Sebastian Stan; Reenactment; and Palm Grove, an erotic thriller with Kate Hudson.

Does Ana de Armas have nude scenes in Blonde?

Yes. In Blonde (2022) Ana de Armas spends long sequences topless and appears fully nude in one scene, her most extensive nudity on screen. She has said she did not feel exploited because she was in control of those decisions.

Why was Blonde rated NC-17?

Blonde was rated NC-17 for its sexual content, an adults-only rating that surprised director Andrew Dominik. It became the first NC-17 film released exclusively on a streaming service, Netflix.

Was Ana de Armas nominated for an Oscar for Blonde?

Yes. Ana de Armas was nominated for Best Actress at the 95th Academy Awards for playing Marilyn Monroe in Blonde, becoming the first Cuban-born actress nominated in the category. She was also nominated for the BAFTA and the SAG Award for the role.

Who is Ana de Armas dating now?

Ana de Armas has not publicly confirmed a partner. In October 2026 she was photographed in Paris with Beto Montenegro, lead singer of the Venezuelan band Rawayana, and celebrity media reported that they were dating. She was previously linked with Tom Cruise in 2025, a relationship neither confirmed and which was reported to have ended that October.