Ana de Armas’s Story Proves Dreams Come True Even When Nobody Believes in You

Ana de Armas is an actress who has been recently becoming very popular in media. With her newest main role in the movie Blonde she is definitely climbing the Hollywood ladders to the stars. However, the actress’s road wasn’t so successful from the beginning. It was very rocky, with many disappointments, and to get where she is now she had to face many difficulties and surpass the challenges of the acting world.

We at 5-Minute Crafts decided to share Ana’s story with you and show you that anything is possible when one sets goals, works hard, and believes in themselves.

Realizing her dream and taking the first steps

Ana was born in Cuba, and from a young age, she knew she wanted to be an actress. When watching movies, she would often try to recreate the scene she saw and liked and repeated it all over again. She started studying theater at age of 14. Unfortunately, she said that there weren’t many opportunities in her home country and that at one point she reached a limit in her career. She also added that the reason she left wasn’t to search for a better life, achieve fame or earn more money but to develop as an artist and gain more experience.

“Unfortunately, there are a lot of good Cuban actors who do what they can with what they have and with the limited access to things they need. I knew that the amount of movies made in Cuba wasn’t many and that I had a ceiling as an actress. That was the only reason why I left,” Ana said in an interview.

Moving to Spain

The actress graduated from the National Theater School of Cuba and tried herself in different movies. However, after realizing her ambitions, she figured out that she needs to move. That is when she decided to go to Madrid and search for more challenging roles. With the money she saved from her acting gigs, she packed, jumped on a plane, and moved to Spain.

“I moved to Madrid with 200 bucks in my pocket to see what was going to happen. Of course, I didn’t know that 200 euros were nothing, because in Cuba, 200 was a lot, and the money I had been saving from my movies,” Ana recalled.

First major roles and a whopping success

Upon her arrival, Ana immediately started going to auditions. She was very persistent and after a few weeks her hard work paid off. She was cast for a role in a teenage drama series called El Internado. The television show became very popular, making Ana a very prominent actress in Spain. However, at some point, Ana got the impression that she was typecast since she was mostly offered roles of teenage girls. Even though the acting gig situation seemed better than in her home country, she still felt that she was missing something.

“It was really exciting, but I got to the point like I had in Cuba where I thought, ’I want more than this,’” Ana revealed. “I wanted something challenging.”

A new beginning in LA

After facing the same feeling she had in Cuba, Ana decided to take her career to a completely new level — so she moved to Los Angeles. Although she was an experienced actress by then, a completely new set of obstacles were waiting for her.

“It was a good exercise for my ego after eight years in Spain having a great career. When you move to the States, whatever you’ve done before doesn’t count,” she said.

Not only she was relatively unknown in a new place, but her understanding of English wasn’t so good. She had to take intense language courses and study hard every day.

“I had to go to class, and so for the first three or four months, I couldn’t do anything,” Ana stated.

Ana wasn’t happy with people labeling her.

Ana didn’t have any issue with starting her career from scratch, but she didn’t want to be labeled for specific roles based on her origin. She didn’t feel she had to settle only for roles that included characters from the Spanish-speaking world, instead, she wanted to be considered for every role that, as an actress, she had the right to audition for.

“I’m an actress. I’ll see what I can do, but don’t put me in a place that you don’t know yet. Don’t put a label on my work before you see it. I just wanted a chance,” de Armas revealed in an interview.

Starring alongside Keanu Reeves and making a breakthrough

With her not speaking English properly and lack of connections, the beginning was really difficult. She learned that casting directors didn’t really care for her previous work and the years she invested in perfecting her skills in Spain and Cuba. Fortunately, the stars smiled down on Ana when she got a role in the movie Knock Knock alongside Keanu Reeves in 2015. Since she still didn’t know English properly, she learned all of her lines phonetically. Reeves later invited Ana to be a part of another film. Finally, her big breakthrough would happen in 2017, when she got a supporting role in the adaptation of Blade Runner 2049.

Working with big stars

After the premiere of Blade Runner 2049, the successes would follow. Ana got a chance to work with some big names like Scott Eastwood, Daniel Craig, Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, and many others. Even though de Armas had quite a nice portfolio by then, she was still being judged based on her accent and nationality. Jamie Lee Curtis, a big name in the film industry, was one of the people who had doubts about Ana.

“I assumed — and I say this with real embarrassment — because she had come from Cuba, that she had just arrived. I made an assumption that she was an inexperienced, unsophisticated young woman,” Curtis said. However, after speaking with de Armas, her doubts quickly vanished, and she was so impressed with the young actress that she wanted to introduce her to Steven Spielberg.

The role of her life

Finally, it was showing that all of de Armas’s work was fruitful. Directors started noticing her and one of them was Andrew Dominik who secured her a leading role in the movie Blonde. In it, Ana is portraying the legendary Marylin Monroe. Her former co-star, Jamie Lee Curtis, was very supportive in saying that, since her [Curtis’s] father played in a movie (Some Like it Hot) with Monroe, she had a lot of pictures of them together and that she was fascinated how Ana and Marylin look like each other.

Ana spent a lot of time preparing for this role, from working with a dialect coach to reading books and studying photographs, videos, and audio recordings of Marylin. She also said that they paid attention to a lot of details so they could depict the late star properly.

“We wanted to tell the human side of her story. Fame is what made Marilyn the most visible person in the world, but it also made Norma the most invisible,” de Armas said.

Ana de Armas is now working on new projects, which many fans are eagerly waiting for.

What do you think about Ana de Armas’s work? Do you think it’s difficult to be a foreign actor/ actress in Hollywood?