“You’re from Cuba, is that correct?” Jimmy Fallon, the host of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, asked Ana de Armas during her first appearance on the program Friday night. Despite his forehead-slapping interview style, there’s no turning away from this magnetic actress during the show. (Fallon, we contend, is delightful in other bits and seems like a swell chap overall.)
The actress, who steals the spotlight from Daniel Craig during the best sequence in No Time to Die, told a few lighthearted anecdotes while publicizing the latest entry in the 007 franchise. When she discussed how commonplace hitchhiking is in Cuba (“free carpool”), Fallon seemed somewhat scandalized, mugging to the camera that any children watching should not do this. (He was only kidding around but apparently could not fathom that all countries are not the same.)
De Armas lightly zinged him, joking that maybe he couldn’t get picked up by drivers as easily as she could.
She also touched on the transition from shooting Blonde, Andrew Dominik’s long-in-development film about Marilyn Monroe, to playing the Cuba-based CIA operative in No Time To Die. “I finished shooting on a Friday, I got on a plane on Saturday, and started shooting Bond on Monday,” she said. On her first day on the Bond set, director Cary Joji Fukunaga had to remind her not to deliver her lines with a breathy, Marilyn-esque cadence, she noted.
Blonde, based on a historical novel by Joyce Carol Oates, will be released by Netflix next year.
De Armas also commented on the “happy coincidence” that she and Craig co-starred in Knives Out, which she called “such a special movie.” She wasn’t even aware that she’d be in the conversation for No Time To Die for another four months, she said.
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