Early on in the making of Blonde, Ana de Armas started seeing Marilyn Monroe in her dreams. She was so immersed in studying and connecting with the woman behind the Hollywood icon that, come nighttime, they would have full-on conversations. “It was beautiful,” de Armas says. “I would wake up the next morning and it just made me feel closer. I felt like I was truly experiencing everything.”

That kind of profound empathy is crucial for a film that is itself part dream and part nightmare. Based on the 2000 novel of the same name by Joyce Carol Oates and directed by Andrew Dominik, Blonde is a bold reimagining of Monroe’s — baptized Norma Jeane Baker — inner life. It’s not a biopic; rather, the film takes a deep dive into its protagonist’s subconscious, exploring the pain, trauma and desires that shaped the woman behind the myth.

Ana de Armas re-creates Marilyn Monroe’s iconic subway grate scene from The Seven Year Itch in Blonde. 

That’s not to say audiences won’t recognize the woman at the center of it all. Like the novel, Blonde is filled with nods to Monroe’s most recognizable movie moments, from her rendition of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” in a shocking pink gown for 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to the now iconic subway grate moment in 1955’s The Seven Year Itch.

“What’s interesting was deconstructing that character of Marilyn Monroe and talking about the woman that she was and what she was feeling when those iconic moments were happening,” de Armas says. “That’s what the movie’s trying to do. It’s going through all these images that we have so integrated and memorized and giving them a whole different meaning, reinterpreting what was going on for her.”

In order to breathe new meaning into famous moments, you first have to bring them to life. Nearly every scene in the film is inspired by an existing visual reference, de Armas says. Dominik, who’s been working on the project for over a decade, created a “reference bible,” clocking in at hundreds of pages and filled with photos meticulously documenting Monroe’s image at various stages of her career and public persona. Her job was two-fold. Step 1) Peel back the emotional layers to reveal the deeper truth of Norma’s experience. Step 2) Physically re-create the moment on screen in excruciating detail.

De Armas gets a makeup touch-up on the set of Blonde.

That’s where hair and makeup department heads Jaime Leigh McIntosh and Tina Roesler Kerwin came in. “One of the first things Andrew said to me was, ‘You can’t just put Marilyn’s makeup on Ana, you have to turn Ana into Marilyn,’ ” Kerwin tells Tudum. Simply applying Monroe’s now-famous beauty techniques to de Armas’ face wouldn’t do the trick.

“Marilyn’s hairline is different than mine, [and] my hair was really dark,” de Armas says. “She had this little peak in her forehead. And then of course they made me bleach my eyebrows and shaved the center of my eyebrows. It was just about finding the shape of her in me.”

Watch Ana de Armas Transform into Marilyn Monroe for Blonde.Ana still slays in a bald cap.

Kerwin, who’d done de Armas’ makeup on The Gray Man, sought that shape through contouring and “a ton of eyelashes,” while McIntosh, who had previously worked with de Armas on Blade Runner 2049, created a prosthetic bald cap that hid the star’s natural hair color. But nailing it once wasn’t enough. Because of the movie’s extended timeline, different scenes called for a varied array of looks — Kerwin estimates the total number to be close to 100. “Marilyn’s face changed,” she says. “We needed Ana to have the younger, fuller face of Norma Jeane as well as the more sculpted face of Marilyn.”

De Armas on the set of Blonde.

To achieve that metamorphosis, de Armas spent up to three hours a day during the film’s 47-day shoot in hair and makeup being turned into Norma Jeane, while Monroe’s real movies played in the background. (Some Like It Hot and The Prince and the Showgirl are tied as de Armas’ favorite Monroe performances: “She is hilarious and so effortless. She has this quality that she’s incandescent. She’s just so bright that... you can’t ignore her.”)

Still, there was one step that was hers alone. “I did my lips,” she says. “At the end of the makeup process, that was kind of the cherry on top. I got really fast at it.”

Things really came together once the wigs entered the picture. Mimicking the star’s hair evolution over the course of her lifetime, McIntosh created multiple iterations of the film’s titular shade, from strawberry blond to bleached platinum. “The key to transforming Ana into Marilyn [was] putting that blond wig onto Ana and seeing her with the makeup,” McIntosh says. “That was ‘Boom,’ for me.”

De Armas as Norma Jeane Baker in Blonde.

Many of the cast and crew who worked on Blonde have a similar story about the first time they witnessed de Armas in full costume, hair and makeup. “I can’t really shake it,” co-star Adrien Brody, who plays The Playwright, tells Tudum. “I have worked for a long time and I don’t know how often I can recall that another actor transported me to another place in time so that I was thinking about it on the ride home. She was channeling Marilyn Monroe to the point that I went home feeling this sense of joy and privilege of working with Marilyn Monroe.”

“I knew she looked like her,” Dominik tells Tudum. “I knew Ana’s face, and there were a lot of similarities. But once the makeup was done and the wig was on, it was incredible. It was seeing a fantasy come to life — a fantasy I’ve been carrying around for a decade.”

Kerwin remembers de Armas bursting into tears, feeling “thrilled and scared” upon seeing her transformation, and very practically wondering: “How are we going to do this every day?”

De Armas drives a convertible on the set of Blonde.

De Armas, however, recalls another pivotal moment that took place later, on set. Much of Blonde was shot on location in Los Angeles, including at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive, where the star was found dead in 1962. Being in the spaces where a woman’s life came full circle, de Armas says, was really what made the character click.

“We went to the apartment [where] she was a kid with her mother, and then we went to her house, where she was until the end of her life. It just gave you so much information about who she was and what she was going through in life. It was very powerful... you could feel that energy.”

The Cast and Crew of Blonde Discuss Finding the Soul of Norma Jeane'Marilyn' is both her armor and the thing that is threatening to consume her.