A fourteen-year-old hitchhiked to the National Theater School of Cuba in Havana in the early 2000s to attend acting training. The later biography, which includes an Academy Award nomination, a James Bond movie, and a portrayal of Marilyn Monroe that divided critics and viewers almost equally, tends to overshadow that detail—the hitching.
However, the part about hitchhiking reveals something about how Ana de Armas’s education really worked: not through institutional convenience but through persistent, unglamorous effort in a city where the resources available to a teen with aspirations were limited in ways that have no real equivalent in Madrid or Los Angeles.
De Armas was admitted to the demanding four-year National Theater School at the age of fourteen, which was young by the school’s standards. She trained there for a number of years before deciding to leave without finishing the course’s final thesis section. This choice is allegedly related to a necessary community service requirement that would have postponed her departure for Spain. She relocated to Madrid when she was eighteen and started working on Spanish-language television practically right away.
The popular drama series El Internado, which lasted from 2007 to 2010, provided her with the kind of long-term professional employment that most drama school graduates struggle to find. She entered it prior to the official completion of her Havana training. Although the Cuban school had taught her the technical skills necessary to learn a character, set a scene, and operate a camera, the true education came from the work itself.
The English language section of the curriculum is the one that is told the most frequently, in part because it is a compelling narrative and in part because it is truly fascinating. De Armas did not know English when he moved to Los Angeles in 2014. She picked up the language through frequent viewing of the American sitcom Friends, which she has used as a model for conversational rhythm and accent patterns, and acting coaching, which she had been utilizing since she was a teenager to study characters.
The Friends detail may raise some doubts because it sounds like a line that has been polished through numerous interviews, but the fundamental truth is undeniable: she learned functional English while simultaneously vying for parts in English-language movies, which is a more rigorous form of language learning than any classroom can offer.
All three educational phases—the Cuban technical training, the Spanish professional experience, and the acquisition of the American language—were validated by the subsequent career. In contrast to Spanish drama, Blade Runner 2049 placed her in a different register in 2017.
In 2019, Knives Out had comedic timing and a sincerity that is actually difficult to replicate. Additionally, Blonde became the first Cuban actress to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress in 2022. At the National Theater School of Cuba, she failed to finish her final thesis. It’s difficult to ignore how the career has rendered that formality rather irrelevant.
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