Where most biopics tend to be straight-up life-story trawls, hitting all the major beats from birth to death, sometimes they take a different approach – scrambling chronology, twiddling with timelines, focusing on a few select days, or finding other unexpected ways to dig beneath the surface. Andrew Dominik’s Marilyn Monroe movie Blonde, starring Ana de Armas as the Hollywood icon, looks to be firmly on the latter end of that spectrum — as you’d expect from the filmmaker behind The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford and Killing Them Softly. Long lingering in limbo and handed a rare NC-17 rating in the States (not that that should matter much, since it’s a Netflix film), it’s been clear for a while that this won’t be your usual soup-to-nuts biography – and the latest full-length trailer promises a film that scratches at the surface of what Marilyn Monroe even was; a role, a performance, the legendary movie star alter-ego of Norma Jean Mortenson. Watch the trailer here:
This latest look at the trailer doesn't expand much on the first teaser (and there's a still a version of 'Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend') running over it). But as that telling tagline suggests, she was watched by all yet seen by one.
“Andrew’s ambitions were very clear from the start — to present a version of Marilyn Monroe’s life through her lens,” says de Armas. “He wanted the world to experience what it actually felt like to not only be Marilyn, but also Norma Jeane. I found that to be the most daring, unapologetic, and feminist take on her story that I had ever seen.”
As for Dominik, he's still pushing back on the idea that the movie – adapted from the novel by Joyce Carol Oates – is controversial. “The film is sincere. It’s made with love. It’s made with good intentions. But it’s full of rage at the same time,” he says. “I seem to get myself in these situations where people regard me as provocative, but it’s never what I’m trying to do. I’m just trying to say it as clearly as I can. My ambition is to make you fall in love with Marilyn.”
With a cast that also includes Adrien Brody, Bobby Cannavale, Xavier Samuel, Julianne Nicholson and Toby Huss, Blonde will arrive on Netflix on 28 September.