Ana de Armas is only in No Time to Die for about 10 minutes, but Anthony Hopkins is only in The Silence of the Lambs for 16 minutes and he won an Oscar for his performance, so…
I’m not saying de Armas deserves an Academy Award for her role as CIA agent Paloma, but I am saying her sequence in Cuba is the best stretch of the movie. She has crackling chemistry with Daniel Craig, and Paloma’s scenes with James Bond bring much-needed levity to a somber (but entertaining) three-hour movie.
It’s an extra-impressive performance once you learn she didn’t have long to train. “My preparation for No Time To Die was not as long as I would have liked it to be. I was shooting [Marilyn Monroe biopic] Blonde, and I had only a few days to train, so I went straight from Blonde to shoot for Bond,” she told Harper’s Bazaar. “I didn’t have the time to actually commit to any kind of diet or workout or training because my schedule just didn’t allow for it.” In the brief amount of time that she did have to prepare, de Armas “had the gun training and learned the choreography for the scenes… It was a short but intense immersion into the Bond universe, so I quickly transformed into a CIA agent.”
And if you got in her way while she was training, look out.
Don’t bother Ana de Armas #NoTimeToDie #JamesBond #007
♬ original sound – James Bond
Give Paloma her own spin-off movie.