Each year, a new crop of rising stars emerge out of Hollywood. And one of the most buzzed-about celebrities of 2020 is 31-year-old Cuban actress Ana de Armas, the new Bond girl in the upcoming film No Time to Die, which hits theaters on Apr. 8. De Armas is also set to star as none other than Marilyn Monroe in the upcoming Netflix biopic Blonde, which does not yet have a release date. So it's only a matter of time before she's a household name. Here's what we know about De Armas so far.
De Armas had her breakout role in Blade Runner 2049 in 2017.
Having started out her film career in Spanish cinema at the age of 16, De Armas moved to Los Angeles in 2014 and landed roles in War Dogs (2016) and Hands of Stone (2016), before making a splash in the blockbuster film Blade Runner 2049 as Ryan Gosling's holographic AI girlfriend, Joi.
She's acted alongside Daniel Craig before.
De Armas earned further praise playing a nurse in the 2019 mystery Knives Out, in which Daniel Craig plays a detective investigating the murder of a wealthy crime novelist. (Her performance even earned her a Golden Globe nomination.) De Armas told The Hollywood Reporter that she was cast as the new Bond girl just one month after finishing Knives Out, and that Craig's seal of approval meant everything to her.
"Daniel was completely on board and supportive of it, which made me very happy," she said. "Having met Daniel before and getting along so well on the set of Knives Out, there was nothing awkward when I got to the Bond set. There was no ice to be broken. It was just easy and smooth.”
She'll be playing a different kind of Bond girl.
We don't know much about De Armas' No Time to Die character, Paloma, yet—other than the fact that she's a CIA agent. But, in Nov. 2019, De Armas told the Los Angeles Times that Paloma will be a departure from the usual femme fatale on 007's arm.
"I wouldn’t say she’s ordinary, because when she needs to perform her job, she does," she said. "But [she] is flawed. She says what she feels, she’s nervous, she’s scared. It’s human. When I read it, I was like, ‘Oh, wait—I can be a Bond girl. I’m that. I’m that messy.’ That’s what felt so attractive, on top of what she’s actually doing in the story, which is another step toward giving women a more powerful and strong place in the films.”
She's currently filming a movie with Ben Affleck.
She was recently spotted laughing with Ben Affleck in the French Quarter of New Orleans while shooting the upcoming erotic thriller Deep Water. Based on a Patricia Highsmith novel, Affleck and De Armas will be playing a couple in a messy marriage that leads to some suspicious murders.
She doesn't like social media.
De Armas may have almost two million followers on Instagram, but it looks like she plans to keep her social media presence pretty low-key.
"I grew up in Cuba and had a lifetime with no social media or internet—the only thing I grew up with was human contact and interactions, so I do think social media can become dangerous when it takes over your life," she told Harper's Bazaar in Apr. 2019. "It’s not fun anymore when all that you are doing is for the purpose of social media–your life will be going straight by you, without you even realizing it, and when that happens, it’s a real shame."
She's been linked to Bradley Cooper.
Clearly, De Armas is pretty private. But what we do know about her love life is that she married Spanish actor Marc Clotet in 2011 and got divorced in 2013. In 2020, she got her first taste of the tabloid rumor mill when she made headlines for allegedly "flirting" with Bradley Cooper at a pre-Golden Globes luncheon in early January. A source told Radar Online that Cooper "seemed very taken with Ana and she was laughing a lot." While the two could know each other from their War Dogs days, time will tell if they're more than former co-stars-turned-friends.
