VARIETY – A few years back, Ana de Armas needed to convince Netflix that she could be Marilyn Monroe.

She was already the first choice of director Andrew Dominik, whose film “Blonde,” a surrealist vision of the life and death of the screen legend, had been reportedly cast with various leading ladies before alighting on de Armas, but “Knives Out” — the hit film in which the previously little-known performer sat at the center of the mystery — hadn’t yet come out. In 2019, few knew her name.

De Armas brought her accent coach to the in-person screen test with Netflix. “I hadn’t had the training and the voice and everything,” says de Armas, who was born and raised in Cuba. “So my coach was crouching on the floor, under the table.” The stakes were high. “I just knew that everything we did that day was going to be the definitive test of the movie to be greenlit or not.” The scene was one in which Monroe pleads with husband Joe DiMaggio to let her move to New York so that she can “start from zero, away from Hollywood,” de Armas recalls; passion had to enter Monroe’s voice, all as the woman under the table fed de Armas the proper pronunciations of the lines.