There are scenes early on in Rian Johnson’s murder mystery, Knives Out, that find Ana de Armas just watching. Surrounded by a who’s who of Hollywood bigwigs including Daniel Craig, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Chris Evans, she plays her character, Marta, with a sense of displacement, observing and fighting to stay above the fracas around her. According to de Armas, that’s not unlike the initial experience of shooting the film itself.
“I felt exactly like Marta,” the Cuban actor said in a recent phone call. “I was being thrown into a situation that I had no idea how to survive.”
Knives Out is an Agatha Christie–inspired whodunit with a contemporary sensibility, one concerned with the suspicious death of Christopher Plummer’s wealthy patriarch, Harlan Thrombey, as well as the coterie of shady Thrombeys who all have reason to want him dead. Thanks to trailers and other promotional materials, Craig—who plays the Southern detective tasked with finding the culprit—seems like the main character. But it’s de Armas, as the old man’s faithful nurse, who emerges as the film’s true heart. And she almost turned the role down entirely.
“The [script] description said Marta was a caretaker, Latina, and pretty. That’s it. And I’m like, What? I’m not doing that,” she said. “Because for a Latina in a setup like this, with a wealthy family and this cast, all I thought was, What am I going to do here? I’ll probably be standing in a corner, not having much to say.”
But after some hounding to get the full script before auditioning, she learned that Marta is not just the audience’s guide through the film’s many twists and turns, but the most fully realized character entirely. She even gets the film’s best, most idiosyncratic quirk: she throws up when she lies. “There are a lot of Latina characters represented in a very small-minded and basic and cliché type of way that I try to get away from,” de Armas said. “And Rian gave me a whole universe.”
It’s the kind of creative freedom she dreamed about at 18, having recently moved to Spain and reckoning with sudden television stardom. After realizing she had bigger, more Hollywood-centric aspirations, she moved to Los Angeles and dove headfirst into intensive language lessons, hoping to nab English-speaking roles. The leap of faith paid off: After supporting arcs alongside Robert De Niro in Hands of Stone and Jonah Hill in War Dogs, she landed the role of Ryan Gosling’s character’s A.I. girlfriend in Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049—a role that put her on the map for directors like Johnson.
With just about a week to prepare for production on Knives Out, de Armas had minimal time to shake off the anxiety of going toe-to-toe with her famous costars—and never let go of it entirely. “I was feeling exactly what I should have been feeling, because that’s exactly where the character was,” she said. “I was discovering who she was as we went along, day by day.”
As the two months of production in the Clue-like mansion rolled along, de Armas found her footing. She counts one pivotal scene with Plummer, which functions both as their characters’ last scene together, as well as the skeleton key that unlocks the film’s mysteries, as her favorite. The logistical difficulties of having to shoot it three times—once the real way, then the way Marta remembered it, and finally the way the audience thought it happened—even compelled her and her costars to pick the script apart to find areas where Johnson must have made continuity errors. “We thought there must be one thing missing, one little detail that could screw up the whole story,” she said. “There isn’t. It’s just perfect.”
With a separate story line involving Marta’s mother’s immigration status, de Armas also shoulders the weight of Knives Out’s politics. Its jabs at Trumpism are, as Johnson admits, “not very subtle,” but they manage to fit into the overall murder mystery under the cover of humor and satire. “In this family, everyone is very wealthy, and the children and grandchildren feel like they can get away with blackmailing people for money and power,” she said. But as a self-described immigrant twice over, first in Spain and now in the United States, she understood her character’s position relative to the money-hungry Thrombeys. “Like Marta, I was pursuing my dream, and I wanted a better life for me, and therefore for my family.”
