“I’m not going to let anybody or anything tell me I cannot dream of playing Marilyn Monroe,” she said. The Cuban actor has spoken about the difficulty of perfecting the accent with over nine months of dialect coaching. De Armas, whose other films include Knives Out and No Time to Die, has called it “the most intense work” she has ever done. The role was originally set to be played by Naomi Watts when the project started development in 2010 before Jessica Chastain took over and then de Armas was finally cast. When sharing her thoughts on a rough cut of the film, which is said to include a rape scene, Oates tweeted that it was “startling, brilliant, very disturbing and perhaps most surprisingly an utterly ‘feminist’ interpretation”.ĭominik has stressed that like Oates’s novel, the film is a work of fiction but “questions why she killed herself, so naturally it’s going to be disturbing” while also comparing it to Citizen Kane and Raging Bull. Dominik has called it the story of “how a childhood trauma shapes an adult who’s split between a public and a private self”.
