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LAS VEGAS – Ana de Armas sobbed the first time she set a guy on fire.
Her assassin character in the “John Wick” franchise spinoff “Ballerina” (in theaters June 6) uses all manner of weaponry when dealing with various villains, including a flamethrower. Before filming a rather fiery sequence, de Armas had a harrowing moment rehearsing with a stuntman where she felt the reality of the fiction they were creating.
“He’s standing in front of me and I'm like, ‘OK, easy. Just going to do it,’ and, of course, he's performing,” de Armas recalls. “But I dropped the thing and started crying because he is burning. It was not a good image.
“I had to unzip the (fireproof) onesie that they put on me and go for a walk. He came and showed me he was OK. But the first impression was really intense. I was not prepared for that. And then I burned like 106 people,” she adds with a proud smile.
After "little tastes" of action in “Ghosted” and “The Gray Man,” plus one memorable sequence in the James Bond movie “No Time to Die,” de Armas, 37, wanted more in her movie career. The Oscar-nominated actress got way more with “Ballerina.”
In the film, Eve Macarro (Ana de Armas) is brought up as a dancer and killer in the criminal Ruska Roma organization after the tragic death of her father when she was a child. Eve is unleashed on the underworld, but when she discovers the cult that killed her dad, she goes rogue on a violent mission of vengeance that ultimately puts her at odds with Wick (Keanu Reeves) himself.
“This is a character with a very strong conviction, or you could say also she's very stubborn,” de Armas says of Eve. “Most of the movie’s about revenge, but then in the end, there's a beautiful twist about trying to change someone else's life.”
Franchise regular Ian McShane sees the addition of de Armas to the “Wick” world as “a gift. She's lovely, she's talented and she can act. What more can you ask?” And Reeves loves watching her “be heroic” as Eve, like John, fights powers beyond her control. “It's cool to see Ana have that opportunity to have the John Wick challenge of 'Against all odds!’ and 'Another kind of revenge!’ ” he says.
However, it was extremely important to both de Armas and director Len Wiseman that Eve not be “a female John Wick.” The filmmaker wanted her to be dynamic but also deal with the fact that de Armas isn't going to look unstoppable going up against, say, a 6-foot-3 assassin.
“We wanted to play the reality. Unless she's thinking more clever about how that fight unfolds, she is going to get her ass kicked,” Wiseman says. “You see action movies where a female lead is just plowing through all these huge dudes, and me as an audience member just loving action, I go, ‘Really?’ So I was glad that Ana's like, ‘Oh, no. Yeah, I should get thrashed.’ ”
That meant coming up with a signature style for Eve: In the Ruska Roma, she’s taught to “fight like a girl,” which means she needs to adapt, to improvise and to cheat. “We thought about that line a lot, and it's like, are people going to take it right?” de Armas says.
In creating the character's action choreography, de Armas leaned into her disadvantages. “I wanted every kick and every punch, and every time I get slammed against the wall or whatever's happening, it hurts,” the actress said. “She gets tired and she's overwhelmed and they keep coming at her. And the only thing that keeps her going is the motivation that she has.”
But Eve is also extremely crafty and can make any object dangerous. She uses dinner plates, forks and candleholders in brawls, duct tapes a knife to a gun (so she can stab one bad guy while shooting another in the face) and, in the super-cool flamethrower faceoff, does damage with a firehose. (Which needed no extra practice, for the record. “That I did on the spot on the day,” de Armas reports.)
Wiseman came up with one of de Armas’ favorite off-the-wall weapons: an ice skate that Eve sticks her hand in and uses like a boxing glove on an enemy. “That could either be really lame and stupid or really cool and brutal,” the director says. The actress recalls the pitch: “I was like, ‘What did you just say?' ” she says with a laugh. “It was really crazy when he thought of it, but then it all made sense. It's painful to even watch it.”
De Armas “never imagined” that her acting career was going to take this action-packed path, she says, and with “Ballerina,” she got what she asked for – and more. “After going through this, I was pretty satisfied.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: In fiery 'Ballerina,' Ana de Armas is more than 'a female John Wick'
Reporting by Brian Truitt, USA TODAY / USA TODAY
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