Ana de Armas

"Blonde" Makeup and hair crew on how they transformed Ana de Armas into Marilyn Monroe.

“The gray is painted into their hair to make them more distinguished.” She adds, “There are silvery streaks painted in, and when you look at the original, you think, ‘Why would they do that?’ So we had to copy that.” In recreating “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” from “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” Kerwin mixed a fuchsia lip with red. Says Kerwin, “We needed something sturdy that could hold up with the gluing and ungluing of wigs.” “It changed the eye shape,” Kerwin explains. It gave us a chance to figure out what worked better in black and white as opposed to color,” explains Kerwin. The shoot session was done before principal filming began, and it helped immensely since they would have to recreate many of Monroe’s most iconic moments.

Ana de Armas completely transforms into Marilyn Monroe in the film 'Blonde.' The hair, makeup, and costume departments tell ELLE.com how it was done.

Even with all the costume changes, Johnson says it felt like de Armas wore those vintage check pants daily, and since there was only one pair, she “was praying they were not going to dissolve.” The authentic 1950s garment from [Palace Costume](https://www.palacecostume.com/history) “fit like a glove.” “I have photographs of her that day at the Plan B office, and there’s Marilyn,” she says. Kerwin provided the additional makeup artists with lip palettes they had made to deliver a consistent visual: “We had put in all the orange reds, they had all the blue reds, and so when the background came in, we had mapped out what was going to work for color or black and white.” That is the most important thing to get there and not just stick a costume on her.” One area Johnson decided to ditch early on was padded foundation garments. Gowns, furs, and glamorous on-set ensembles are a fraction of the costume story being told in Blonde, which has a “sense of naturalism” that Johnson notes is the focus of the novel and Dominik’s direction. “They had her on the monitor, and the actual footage [from Some Like It Hot] on the monitor next to it,” McIntosh recalls. The two formats impact the choice of makeup, and the “biggest thing to figure out was the lip colors” because some pop, whereas others fade away. A couple of days of testing was required to “find out what worked, what didn’t and to find our Marilyn in Ana,” says Kerwin about her expressive lashes. During production, they were shaved down by Kerwin and then bleached every couple of days, which took some getting used to [for the star](https://youtu.be/BOa89RpMYf0?t=221): “Ana has beautiful brows, and it was a shock for her to see herself in the newly thinned out blonde brow.” Western Costume cobbler Mauricio Osorio came up with a workaround that required excellent quality shoes to use as a foundation that “Ana loves, are comfortable, and have the correct shape and height.” Johnson turned to The RealReal to get a pair of Manolo Blahniks that are “still quite expensive but saved us from having to make the shoe from the ground up.” The guts of the shoe are still Manolos: “He basically rips the whole shoe apart, takes the top off, and rips the leather off the heel. Using prosthetics instead of a bald cap “so we could see scalp through the wigs.” Kerwin explains that after applying the prosthetic pieces, “it was all airbrushed to be the same color, and then the blonde wigs would sit on what was looking like skin.” It is here that Monroe’s hair was dyed its famous shade (ditto Lucille Ball’s signature hue) and this snapshot of Tinseltown was the first stop on “Team Marilyn’s train.” As well as recreating images, Dominik also shot on location at Monroe’s famous haunts, including Musso and Frank’s and the house she shared with Arthur Miller.

Andrew Dominik's adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates novel is a morbid, leering and tasteless abasement.

This goes double during a scene when Monroe is filming the subway-grate shot in “The Seven Year Itch,” during which his camera lingers and leers with unsavory insistence. There are short clips of her work in such classics as “All About Eve,” “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and “Some Like It Hot,” but Dominik never allows de Armas to convey her character’s exquisite comic timing, superb physical grace or shrewdness. She certainly deserves more than a dumb “Blonde.” That scene ends with a rape that can’t help but conjure images of Harvey Weinstein and the “casting couch” tradition he so brutally perpetuated. Kennedy (Caspar Phillipson), who features in one of the film’s many tasteless scenes, in this case of Monroe performing oral sex while he watches a rocket launch on TV. The rest of “Blonde” continues apace, with Monroe encountering creepy, dismissive or outright violent men who continually underestimate and betray her.

Transforming Ana de Armas into Marilyn Monroe for Netflix's new biopic Blonde was a team effort. Here's how Tina Roesler Kerwin, Jennifer Johnson, ...

There’s a humor and a whims whimsy to his costumes and a lightness to the spirit of his designs. We were trying to figure out how William Travilla made that moment work in a column dress with a big bow on the back and we learned that when he was working on the dress, he borrowed pool table fabric from the art department at Fox Studios next door. He got a bolt of green felt and backed the dress with that. I actually haven't seen the dress since we made the film in 2019 and I would love to look at it again because I think that it's probably a bit garish in person. Also wearing pants was really important in the movie, so your gaze would be taken away from her body and would be really placed on her interior—on her mental workings, on her intellect, on her psychological state. So I was able to push it a little bit further than Tina was because I didn't have those restrictions." Jamie-Leigh would also help sell some of the more casual looks with the movement and the wave of the hair." Finding that shape, that texture and that hairstyle was a challenge." You still want it to have the hold and the style without losing the softness, so it can look touchable." But overall, very little product because the more product that's in the hair, the more it can tend to start looking helmet-y and not move naturally. The blonde wig did not work on Ana’s hair so I had to put three prosthetic pieces underneath the wigs to give her a half bald cap so that the blonde wigs looked like they were actually sitting on skin. There are so many different Marilyns, so we needed to find a baseline, an image that you see most of her.

Blonde, based on Joyce Carol Oates's fictionalised interpretation of the star's tragic life, is the first movie due for release on a streaming service ...

At the risk of perpetuating a fallacy sustained by commentators of the day and conflating Monroe with the characters she portrayed, allow me to quote Lorelei Lee, her gold-digging seductress from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. That Norma Jeane spends a sizeable chunk of her time at home in nothing but white bloomers only strengthens the impression that Blonde takes an infantilising view of its subject. Of her limited vocabulary, the word in heaviest rotation is "daddy". In the bedroom as on the sound stage, Norma Jeane appears constantly on the verge of tears, her big, beautiful eyes welling with emotion and widened with some stressful mixture of fear and wonder. There's the increasingly hallucinogenic storytelling style, evoking its leading lady's descent into madness and addiction, the strangely stilted dialogue, and a score (by Dominik regulars Nick Cave and Warren Ellis) that cribs freely from Angelo Badalamenti (distractingly so in one climactic sequence, set to a dead ringer for the Twin Peaks theme song). The growing chasm between these two selves – public-facing and private – could only resolve in tragedy; whether by an intentional or accidental act of self-destruction, Monroe was dead at 36.

Costume designer Jennifer Johnson explains how her team re-created Marilyn Monroe's wardrobe for Ana de Armas's costumes in Netflix's Blonde.

"It's easy enough to copy something verbatim, it's another thing to bring something so iconic that is imbued in the world's psyche back from the dead. But she made an exception for diamonds, as all of Monroe's jewelry was real. In terms of her style point of view, Monroe was a minimalist. Award-winning costume designer [Jennifer Johnson](http://www.jenniferjohnsoncostume.com/) ("I, Tonya") re-created Monroe's iconic outfits with the help of patternmaker Jose Bello at [Western Costume](https://www.westerncostume.com/). "Getting the construction details just right was important, but so was being flexible with certain details and fabric choices to work for Ana," Johnson tells POPSUGAR. If you buy a product we have recommended, we may receive affiliate commission, which in turn supports our work.

The fictional biopic of Marilyn Monroe has steadily accumulated its fair share of controversy--and now you can see for yourself what the buzz has been ...

She also recently discussed the future of the James Bond series, saying [Bond should not be played by a woman](https://www.gamespot.com/articles/there-is-no-need-for-female-bond-ana-de-armas-says/1100-6505704/). [Empire](https://www.empireonline.com/movies/news/marilyn-monroe-movie-blonde-create-controversy-says-ana-de-armas-exclusive/) over the summer, "It's a film that is supposed to create controversy and discomfort." "It's supposed to make you think about what happened--and what is still happening," de Armas said. It tells the story of how a woman, Norma Jeane Baker, became the incredibly popular celebrity Marilyn Monroe in the '50s and '60s. The movie is not a traditional biopic however, as it blurs the lines between fact and fiction, Netflix said. Netflix's Marilyn Monroe movie, Blonde, which stars Ana de Armas in the lead role, is now available to stream.

Blonde is a beautifully made movie with a superb performance by Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe. So why does it feel so empty?

In certain scenes shot on black and white film, with Dominik recreating the exact blocking of a scene from, say, Some Like It Hot (1959), it took this reviewer a moment to recognize he was looking at de Armas and not the actual Monroe of 60 years ago. And rest assured, Blonde is obsessed with the absence of Marilyn’s father, going so far as to suggest that hole in her formative years is something akin to the Rosebud sled in Citizen Kane. Ultimately, the movie’s pretensions of attempting a quixotic examination of Marilyn Monroe’s sex life amounts to little more than art house cinema proving it isn’t above exploitation. While that is true, there’s still little difference in sentiment from the dismissive studio head Daryl Zanuck who refused to ever take Marilyn seriously and the way Blonde lingers as much or more on the sexcapades of Marilyn’s life than how she felt about the men in them. Instead the movie chooses to revel in the objectification demanded by a misogynistic society, and how eagerly Monroe pursued it. As per the movie, the unlikely pairing was due to the celebrated playwright becoming as attracted to her mind and underrated intellect as he is to her famed physique. It’s even a bit of fitting irony, too, that the most buzzed about element is not the movie star Blonde has ostensibly come to eulogize, but the curiosity factor around the one who seems poised to become an A-list sensation by playing her. Which is why Blonde’s attempt to bury it under so much artifice of its own, and a good deal of fiction from author Joyce Carol Oates—whose Blonde novel rewrote Monroe’s life for the worst—misses out on the opportunity provided by de Armas’ almost-great performance. It’s a shame then that Blonde is no more interested in being kind, or necessarily self-aware, than the legion of wolves who leer at Marilyn for nearly three hours throughout the picture. Given that backdrop, it’s no small wonder Norma Jeane was anxious to become Marilyn after the movie cuts to her adulthood. All the months and years leading up to Blonde’s premiere centered around apprehension in the media over a Cuban woman playing the American movie star. Whereas the male emblem of 1950s sex got a glorifying piece of hagiography courtesy of Baz Luhrmann over the summer, Andrew Dominik’s Blonde is eager to strip away the lairs of popular fantasy (and just about everything else) until all we’re left with is a fragile, scared young woman who was smothered by the adoration that gave her everything…

The highly anticipated film by Andrew Dominick is based on Joyce Carol Oates's 2000 novel of the same name and explores the troubled star's identities of her ...

"I tried several foundations to try to replicate Marilyn's glow, but this one was very reflective, so it would bounce the light back and give that sort of period's look, but also that sheen that she had on her face," the makeup artist shares. And certainly we went to Guerlain because that was one of the companies Marilyn used." "We tried several different ones and the black was too black," Kerwin says. "This was a game-changer for this part of her look, so I was really grateful to have found it." Kerwin says she tried a "truckload" of lipsticks to find the perfect shades that not only embodied Monroe, but also worked with the film's color and black-and-white lighting. Once the wigs were set with wet rollers, McIntosh would "brush it out so it was looser and messier, and [would] spritz it down with a little water" to match the reference images for the scenes. "I don't think there's a lip company that we didn't put through the ringer trying to figure it out. "When we were doing research for the wigs, we had to consider Marilyn's hair texture," McIntosh says. "As soon as she put the wig on, we knew we had to change her eyebrows," Kerwin shares. "Because of the fine detail and the lightness of the hairline on those wigs, there was just no other way to hide Ana's dark hair, McIntosh says. "We just had to completely erase Ana's hairline and the depth that was under there." However, it was vital that the hair and makeup didn't read as de Armas wearing a Monroe costume.