Jamie Lee Curtis admits she thought Ana De Armas ‘had just arrived’ from Cuba on Knives Out set

Jamie Lee Curtis has confessed she thought Ana De Armas ‘had just arrived’ from Cuba when they met on the set of the 2019 movie Knives Out.

Ana, 34, had already spent years acting in Hollywood movies with stars like Keanu Reeves and Bradley Cooper before Knives Out took her to a new level of fame.

But Jamie Lee told Elle she had never heard of Ana before their film together and assumed ‘she was an inexperienced, unsophisticated young woman,’ even thinking of pitching her to Steven Spielberg for West Side Story.

Jamie Lee, whose parents were the Old Hollywood stars Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, recalled: ‘I assumed – and I say this with real embarrassment – because she had come from Cuba, that she had just arrived.’

Said she: ‘I made an assumption that she was an inexperienced, unsophisticated young woman. That first day, I was like: “Oh, what are your dreams?”‘

She made sure to note that the reason she asked about Ana’s ‘dreams’ was that the younger actress had wowed her with her performance in Knives Out.

In fact, Jamie Lee wanted to pitch Ana to Spielberg as a potential Maria for his new West Side Story film, a part ultimately played by YouTube star Rachel Zegler. 

Throwback: Ana had made her English-language film debut years earlier in the 2015 film Knock Knock, whose premiere she is pictured at with hits leading man Keanu Reeves

Jamie Lee is godmother to Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal and hoped to introduced Ana to them – only to discover that Ana and Jake were already acquainted.

Ana came up as a teenage actress in Cuba before moving to Madrid at 18 and embarking on a successful career on Spanish television.

When she arrived in Hollywood, her first-ever English language feature was a Keanu Reeves film called Knock Knock, which came out in 2015.

By the time production began on Knives Out, she had already been seen in a major supporting role in Blade Runner 2049 opposite Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford. 

Star-studded: Ana and Jamie Lee are pictured in Knives Out alongside Don Johnson, who plays the cheating husband of Jamie Lee’s character

Jamie Lee was not the only co-star to be moved by Ana’s performance in Knives Out – Daniel Craig, pictured with her in the film, was as well

Jamie Lee was not the only co-star to be moved by Ana’s performance in Knives Out – Daniel Craig was famously so taken with her acting skills that he secured her a role in his final James Bond film No Time To Die.

Fans of Ana are now eagerly awaiting her performance as Marilyn Monroe in the upcoming Netflix biopic Blonde, based on a novel by Joyce Carol Oates.

The movie set tongues wagging earlier this year when news broke that it has been given an infamously rare NC-17 rating.

Side by side: Daniel was famously so taken with her acting skills that he secured her a role in his final James Bond film No Time To Die, in which they are pictured

Jamie Lee, whose father played opposite Marilyn in the iconic Billy Wilder comedy Some Like It Hot, has given Ana her imprimatur.

‘She showed me a picture of her as Marilyn. My father was in Some Like It Hot, and I have a lot of photos of my father and Marilyn,’ Jamie Lee told Elle. 

‘It was a couple of still pictures and one video of her moving through space with no audio. But it was so shocking because she was Marilyn.’

Sizzling sensation: Fans of Ana are now eagerly awaiting her performance as Marilyn Monroe in the upcoming Netflix biopic Blonde, based on a novel by Joyce Carol Oates

Throwback: Jamie Lee, whose father Tony Curtis played opposite Marilyn in the iconic Billy Wilder comedy Some Like It Hot (pictured), has given Ana her imprimatur