Sixty years on from her premature demise, Marilyn Monroe stays the definition of a Hollywood icon. Her movies, her look, her voice and her persona all are without end etched within the annals of film historical past – which suggests any actor hoping to step into her sneakers actually has their work minimize out. For Andrew Dominik’s Blonde, an adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ fictionalised story of Monroe’s life, Knives Out star Ana de Armas is tasked with embodying the blonde bombshell – and it’s a duty that got here with appreciable stress.

Chatting with Empire about inhabiting Marilyn Monroe, de Armas admits she felt insecure. “I used to be insecure about my voice, concerning the accent, concerning the choreography, about working with American actors who know her higher than me, every thing!” she says. That response, she explains, turned a part of the efficiency. “All of that was precisely what she can be feeling. So it was unbelievable. Although it looks like every thing was very unhappy, and a whole lot of crying and traumatic issues have been occurring, we had a good time.”

The actor had a wealth of fabric to attract from when crafting her efficiency – not simply Oates’ novel, however a tome consisting of iconic Marilyn Monroe pictures curated by the director. “Andrew gave us a bible of 700-and-something footage,” de Armas says. “The entire film was on this bible, image by image, each scene.” That stack of pictures knowledgeable the movie’s formally-playful presentation, switching between facet ratios, and from color to black-and-white over its near-three-hour runtime. “That’s the relation between the black-and-white and color; it’s due to the images, it’s not random,” de Armas explains. “You need the viewers to instantly interact, even of their unconscious, to one thing that they’ve already seen, and get them into the story.” Get able to see an icon, then – however in a approach you’ve by no means seen her earlier than.

Learn Empire’s full Blonde characteristic, getting the within story on Andrew Dominik’s wild imaginative and prescient and Ana de Armas’ daring lead efficiency, within the Glass Onion: A Knives Out Thriller difficulty – on newsstands from Thursday 1 September, and obtainable to order on-line right here. Blonde might be in choose cinemas from 21 September, and on Netflix from 28 September.