Ana de Armas

Ana de Armas was born in Havana on 30 April 1988 and grew up in Santa Cruz del Norte, a coastal town east of the capital. Her father taught, ran a school and served as deputy mayor; her mother worked in human resources at the Ministry of Education. Her childhood coincided with Cuba's Special Period, the years of blackouts and ration books that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, and she has always described it as a happy one anyway.

At fourteen she got into Havana's national arts school. At sixteen she was already shooting Una rosa de Francia. She left the course without submitting her thesis, because Cuban graduates owed the state several years of social service and she had no intention of waiting that long.

Madrid, then a hard exit

Her maternal grandparents had emigrated from northern Spain, which meant that at eighteen she could board a plane to Madrid holding a Spanish passport. Work came quickly. The teen thriller 'El internado' made her a household name in Spain between 2007 and 2010, alongside Yon González, Martiño Rivas and Amaia Salamanca.

In 2010 she asked the writers to kill her character off. She had spent three years playing Carolina Leal, the show was going to continue without her, and she wanted to leave without a way back. Around it she made Spanish films including Sex, Party and Lies (2009) with Mario Casas and the thriller Blind Alley (2011), plus seventeen episodes of the historical drama 'Hispania, la leyenda'.

Los Angeles with almost no English

She moved in 2014, aged 26, barely able to hold a conversation in English. Four months of intensive lessons later she started auditioning. She has said that a fair amount of the English came from watching 'Friends'. The first job was Knock Knock (2015), Eli Roth's home invasion nasty, in which she and a fellow houseguest terrorise Keanu Reeves in his own living room.

Supporting parts in bigger films followed: Hands of Stone (2016) with Robert De Niro, and Todd Phillips' arms dealing comedy War Dogs (2016) with Jonah Hill and Miles Teller.

Then Denis Villeneuve cast her as Joi in Blade Runner 2049 (2017), the holographic girlfriend Ryan Gosling's character buys and falls for. The part exists only as projected light, so she had to play every scene without touching anything.

Marta Cabrera, then Paloma

Rian Johnson put her at the centre of Knives Out (2019) and handed her the trickiest job in it: the nurse who physically cannot lie without being sick. It brought a Golden Globe nomination and a National Board of Review prize for the ensemble, which included Daniel Craig, Jamie Lee Curtis and Christopher Plummer. Made for 40 million dollars, it took more than 312 million.

The same year she shot Olivier Assayas' Wasp Network, about Cuban spies in Miami, with Penélope Cruz and Wagner Moura.

'Knives Out' also handed her the next job. Craig was impressed enough to recommend her to the Bond producers, Cary Fukunaga built a character around her, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge wrote it.

The result was Paloma in No Time to Die (2021), a rookie CIA agent who spends half her big sequence apologising for how little training she has had and the other half winning the gunfight. She is on screen for barely ten minutes of Craig's last Bond film and walked off with a large share of the reviews. Spain's actors' union named her best actress in an international production for it.

Marilyn

Blonde (2022) remains the most argued about thing she has done. Andrew Dominik's Netflix adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates' novel required her to play Marilyn Monroe, and she took her dialect coach into the screen test, where the woman spent the meeting crouched under the table. "It was against all odds that a Cuban actress was ever going to play Marilyn Monroe," she said later.

It premiered at Venice to a standing ovation of roughly a quarter of an hour and reviews that split down the middle. Almost everyone, including the film's critics, separated her performance from the rest of it. In January 2023 she was nominated for the Academy Award for best actress, the first Cuban performer ever nominated in that category, with BAFTA, Golden Globe and SAG nominations alongside it.

Three years on, she is blunt about what that did for her. Asked at the Red Sea festival in December 2025 whether the nomination had opened doors, she said it hadn't. "I feel like some people think that it was kind of a fluke. There's still this kind of feeling of having to prove myself again somehow."

Action, and a full diary

Since then she has mostly worked at scale. She made Deep Water (2022) with Ben Affleck for Adrian Lyne, played an agent in The Gray Man, and led Ghosted (2023) opposite Chris Evans, on which she is also an executive producer. That same year she hosted an episode of 'Saturday Night Live' and used the monologue to announce that she would be a United States citizen within three weeks.

In 2024 she was the self styled baroness in Ron Howard's Eden, a survival drama about European settlers on a Galápagos island, with Jude Law, Vanessa Kirby, Daniel Brühl and Sydney Sweeney.

Her first go at carrying an action film came in June 2025 with Ballerina, in which she is Eve Macarro, a dancer trained as an assassin. It sits between John Wick: Chapter 3 and John Wick: Chapter 4, was directed by Len Wiseman and took around 140 million dollars.

Three things are on her desk now. 'Reenactment' is a Grant Singer thriller she has shot with Benicio Del Toro and Cameron Diaz. 'Sweat', in which she plays a fitness influencer, started filming in March between Los Angeles and the UK for J Blakeson. And 'Bananas' is an Apple TV+ series from David O. Russell with Oscar Isaac.

She gives away very little about her private life. She married the Spanish actor Marc Clotet in July 2011 and they separated less than two years later. Her relationship with Ben Affleck, which began on the set of 'Deep Water' and ended in January 2021, came with photographers permanently parked outside the house. Not long after, she left Los Angeles and bought a place in Vermont. Given how the last decade has gone, it's hard to blame her.

The earliest credit MovieNCo has for Ana de Armas is Una rosa de Francia (2005); in all, 23 films and 1 TV show over 20 years. They have worked as actress in 24 and producer in 1. Their title most voted by MovieNCo readers is The Boarding School (2007), with 456 votes. Their busiest decade is the 2010s, with 12 titles. The person they have worked with most is Keanu Reeves, on 3 films, among them Knock Knock and Ballerina.