Keanu Reeves, while a talented actor and an all-around swell guy, has been in a lot of crummy movies. The Day the Earth Stood Still, Sweet November, something called Generation Um… — not great! The 2015 horror-thriller Knock Knock (37 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes) is near the bottom, too, but it gets a pass because it did one good thing: it helped get Ana de Armas cast as Marilyn Monroe.
The Los Angeles Times spoke to de Armas and learned that Blonde director, Andrew Dominik, first caught sight of his future-Norma Jeane “in Eli Roth’s 2015 home-invasion horror flick Knock Knock, where she played a murderous visitor opposite Keanu Reeves. It was then that he noticed both her physical resemblance to Monroe and the je ne sais quoi of her screen presence.” Dominik invited de Armas to audition for the coveted part, and when “she read for it, you could feel her — the world revolved around her onscreen,” he told the Times. “The film didn’t really come to life until Ana appeared.”
What Keanu Reeves co-star should be cast as a Hollywood legend next? The campaign to get SpongeBob SquarePants to play Cary Grant begins now.
The NC-17-rated Blonde will be released on Netflix on September 28.
(Via the Los Angeles Times)
