Legends & Their Time

The Cuban Woman Who Became Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood's Most Breathtaking Transformation

"Circa 2022, on a film set in Hollywood, something happened inside a makeup trailer that the cast and crew of Netflix's Blonde still struggle to put into words, because what they witnessed was not simply an actress getting ready for work, it was a resurrection, and it happened in stages, slowly, painstakingly, over the course of two and a half hours every single morning across a grueling 47-day shoot. Ana de Armas would sit with her hair pulled back while the makeup department applied silicone prosthetic pieces beneath the wigs, leaving her looking half-bald for a stretch of time, sitting in a kind of limbo between two identities, until the very last ten minutes when the finishing touches would arrive and Marilyn would emerge from nowhere. What makes this story almost unbearably fascinating is the sheer engineering of it, because a blonde wig placed over Ana's naturally dark brown hair would have looked obviously wrong, so the team had an epiphany, using prosthetics to form a partial bald cap that served as an artificial but completely natural-looking scalp, allowing them to nail every detail of Monroe's hair right down to her widow's peak. The three custom-made wigs used most throughout the film were designed from the ground up, with every detail considered, from the right texture and color to the density, the shape of the hairline, and even the tiny baby hairs that may have come from chemical breakage caused by Marilyn's own years of bleaching. Ana's eyebrows, naturally dark just like her hair, had to be minimized and bleached, and the team experimented with nearly twenty different lip colors, because shades that looked perfect in color did not always translate correctly to the film's black and white sequences. In total, the makeup team created over one hundred looks for the character, and around fifty to sixty made it into the final cut, while Ana wore blue contact lenses and false eyelashes to reshape her eyes to match Monroe's longer lash line. Adrien Brody, her co-star, said he went home after working with Ana feeling a sense of joy and privilege, as though he had just worked alongside Marilyn Monroe herself. When Blonde debuted at the Venice Film Festival, Ana received an eleven-minute standing ovation, and within its first weeks on Netflix the film was streamed for more than seventeen million hours. A Cuban woman who grew up with electricity blackouts sat in a chair for two and a half hours every morning and came out the other side as one of the most recognizable human beings who ever lived, earning Academy Award, Golden Globe, BAFTA, and SAG nominations in the process, and the world could not look away, because when art is this committed, this precise, and this fearless, it stops being performance and starts being something closer to magic."