Ana de Armas to play Marilyn Monroe in "Blonde"

For the last several years, Andrew Dominik has been developing an adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates‘ acclaimed novel Blonde at Netflix, and at long last, he has settled on his Marilyn Monroe. Multiple sources tell Collider that Blade Runner 2049 star Ana de Armas is Dominik’s choice to play the Hollywood icon best known for films such as Some Like It Hot, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and The Seven Year Itch. Dominik previously told Collider that he believes Blonde “will be one of the ten best movies ever made,” explaining that “it’s a film about the human condition. It tells the story of how a childhood trauma shapes an adult who’s split between a public and a private self. It’s basically the story of every human being, but it’s using a certain sense of association that we have with something very familiar, just through media exposure. It takes all of those things and turns the meanings of them inside out, according to how she feels, which is basically how we live. It’s how we all operate in the world. It just seems to me to be very resonant. I think the project has got a lot of really exciting possibilities, in terms of what can be done, cinematically.”

Sources caution that while Ana de Armas is in early talks, she does not have a closed deal yet, nor has the project been greenlit yet by the streaming company, though others say production could start as soon as this summer. Dominik wrote the script and will produce along with Brad Pitt and Dede Gardner‘s Plan B banner. Blonde follows the talented Norma Jeane Mortenson as she blossoms into movie star Marilyn Monroe. But after a series of failed relationships and heartbreaking tragedy, she spirals into drug addiction and mental instability. The project has had a long development history, with Naomi Watts and Jessica Chastain slated to play Marilyn in past incarnations. De Armas may not have the same wealth of experience as a lead, but she has been making a name for herself as a rising star over the past four years. The Cuban actress broke out in Todd Phillips‘ arms dealer dramedy War Dogs and, perhaps most memorably, as Ryan Gosling‘s holographic love interest Joi in Denis Villenueve‘s Blade Runner 2049. De Armas has already wrapped several high-profile features including Rian Johnson‘s murder mystery Knives Out and Danny Boyle‘s romantic musical Yesterday. Source: www.collider.com

"A lush-bodied girl in the prime of her physical beauty. In an ivory georgette crepe sundress with a halter top that gathers her breasts up in soft undulating folds of the fabric. She's standing with bare legs apart on a New York subway grating. Her blond head is thrown rapturously back as an updraft lifts her full, flaring skirt, exposing white cotton panties. The ivory-crepe sundress is floating and filmy as magic." Happiness so acute it was like broken glass in Norma Jeane's mouth. Her waxy-pale skin gave off waves of heat like pavement in summer sun and her eyes!-flirty, slip-sliding and dilated. Norma Jeane stared memorizing what she saw; she was a camera taking snapshots; one day she might be lost and have to find her way back to this place she'd never seen before until this moment, but with Gladys such moments were urgent, highly charged and mysterious, to make your pulse beat hard as with a drug. Familiar, too, was the airless heat of the apartment, for Gladys didn't believe in leaving windows open even a crack while she was away, the pungent odor of coffee grounds, cigarette ashes, scorch, perfume, and that mysterious acrid chemical odor Gladys could never entirely wash away even if she scrubbed at her hands with medicinal soap. Yet these smells were comforting to Norma Jeane for they meant home. Coughing, Gladys seemed to give off a stronger scent of perfume, mingled with that faint sour-lemon chemical odor that seemed absorbed in her skin. 

There were fields of fire, canyons of fire, fireballs like comets within a few miles of Santa Monica. Sparks, borne by the wind like malicious seeds, erupted into flame in the residential communities of Thousand Oaks, Malibu, Pacific Palisades, and Topanga. There were tales of birds bursting into flame in midair. Gladys' face was a waxy-pale cosmetic mask like a mannequin's face, the features highlighted, her perfume sharply sweet, like the decaying oranges in their mostly iceless icebox. Gladys snorted: "Sometimes, Norma Jeane, you sound like such a fool. Like the rest of them." Gladys was committed to the California State Psychiatric Hospital, where her official diagnosis was: "Acute chronic paranoid schizophrenia with alcoholic and drug-induced neurological impairment." Norma Jeane's rage stoked a madness of ambition to revenge herself upon the world by conquering it-however any "world" is "conquered" by an individual who was female, parentless, isolated, and seemingly a solitary insect amid a teeming mass of insects. 

'Yet I will make you all love me,' was then Norma Jeane's threat. Norma Jeane's laugh was odd, unmusical: high-pitched and squeaky as a mouse being stepped on. Marilyn would let pasta boil to a mush if you didn't watch her and she was always dropping things in the kitchen. She couldn't do a risotto, her mind was always drifting off. She tasted something, she didn't know what she was tasting. 'Is it too salty? Does it need salt?' She thought onions and garlic were the same thing! She thought olive oil was the same as melted margarine! She leaved tissues caked with makeup in the bathroom, there were ugly splotches of makeup in the sink, blond hairs in combs and hairbrushes; and scum in the bathtub, unless he cleaned it himself. God damn. Sometimes she forgot to flush the toilet. Almost, it seemed it was ordinary life baffled her. And, that wistful little-girl look in her face, "Daddy, how hard it is to figure what people mean when probably they don't mean anything?" Joe would shake his head, not knowing what the hell to say. He'd dated actresses, models and party girls, and he'd have sworn he knew the personality type, but Marilyn was something else. Like his buddies said, suggestively, giving him a poke in the ribs, 'Marilyn's something else, eh?' Those assholes didn't know the half of it. Sometimes she scared him. Like if an actual doll opened its blue glass eyes and you're expecting baby talk but she says something so weird, and possibly so deep, you can't grasp it.  —"Blonde" (2000) by Joyce Carol Oates.