Blonde star Ana de Armas says it took nine months of vocal coaching to capture Marilyn Monroe’s voice

‘It was a big torture, so exhausting. My brain was fried’

Blonde star Ana de Armas says it took nine months of vocal coaching to capture Marilyn Monroe’s voice (Getty Images)

Ana de Armas has opened up about preparing to capture Marilyn Monroe for Netflix's forthcoming biographical drama Blonde.

“It only took me nine months of dialect coaching, and practising, and some ADR sessions [rerecording dialogue after filming],” de Armas told The Times of London about what it was like to get the famous actress’s famously breathy vocals right. ”It was a big torture, so exhausting. My brain was fried.”

“I had a lot of thoughts as a woman in the industry, and even in general, about how things from the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s are so relatable to nowadays," the Knives Out actor, 32, continued. “And how if you don’t have a strong base, with your family and so on, it’s really hard to make it through – really hard.”

The Cuban actor’s previous roles, in addition to her Golden Globe-nominated turn in Knives Out, include Blade Runner 2049, and the latest James Bond film, No Time To Die, which was recently pushed back to November 2021 due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.  

Blonde, which is directed by Andrew Dominik, is an adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates's 2000 novel, which offers a fictionalised look at Monroe’s inner life. Blonde has no release date yet.

"I only had to audition for Marilyn once and Andrew said ‘It’s you,’ but I had to audition for everyone else,” de Armas told Vanity Fair last year of the road to getting her role. 

“The producers. The money people. I always have people I needed to convince. But I knew I could do it. Playing Marilyn was groundbreaking. A Cuban playing Marilyn Monroe. I wanted it so badly. You see that famous photo of her and she is smiling in the moment, but that’s just a slice of what she was really going through at the time.”