In Blonde, de Armas transforms into iconic starlet Marilyn Monroe — but this story isn’t quite the one you might read in your Hollywood history books. The film paints Monroe’s life as a psychological horror story, one that dances back and forth from painstaking recreations of Monroe’s onscreen work to surreal sequences that dive into her traumatized psyche. Through it all, de Armas is nothing less than bewitching, tackling a grueling role with the grace and charm of a true movie star. This isn’t a celebrity impression; it’s a bold and brutal reimagining that won de Armas her first Oscar nomination, the first Cuban-born performer to be honored by the Academy.

In the new action thriller from the directors of Avengers: Endgame, de Armas plays Dani Miranda, a CIA operative swept up in the pursuit of Sierra Six — a top-secret (and notoriously deadly) assassin as played by Ryan Gosling. Miranda is a loyal soldier, but as the chase goes on, she finds herself more and more entangled with Six. And she’ll need to decide which side she’s really on. It’s a bone-crunchingly physical performance for de Armas, who holds her own alongside the film’s many stuntmen and action heroes.

In Todd Phillips’ Iraq War satire, de Armas plays Iz, the girlfriend of unlikely arms dealer David Packouz (Miles Teller). Her character is as close to a moral compass as the movie gets, especially after she realizes the true nature of her husband’s business. It’s an early high-profile English-language performance for the Cuban-born actor, and she’s a hypnotic presence, difficult to look away from.

De Armas’ breakout Hollywood role came in Denis Villeneuve’s sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi masterpiece. In her first co-starring role opposite Gosling, de Armas plays Joi, a holographic romantic companion with more on her mind than she was programmed for. De Armas is tasked with playing both the loyal, kind Joi and her many similar counterparts throughout the film’s cyberpunk story. In one scene, she and Gosling’s Officer K share an intimate moment with a physical surrogate (Mackenzie Davis). The trio’s forms blur and shift into one another in one of the more memorable love scenes ever seen onfilm. It’s beautiful — and more than a little chilling.

Oddly enough, War Dogs isn’t de Armas’ only go at an Iraq War drama. In this 2020 biopic, she plays Carolina, a young woman in a relationship with United Nations representative Sérgio Vieira de Mello (Wagner Moura). The film tackles the aftermath of the United States’ invasion of Iraq, and de Mello’s part in fighting against the country’s occupation. De Armas, playing a UN official in her own right, commands the screen.

Like Sergio,this 2020 Olivier Assayas film also features de Armas and Wagner Moura in a romantic entanglement — here she plays his character’s wife. Assayas, who directed the gorgeously haunting Personal Shopper, takes on the story of Cuban spies in the United States in the 1990s. Sharing the screen with Penélope Cruz, Édgar Ramírez, and Gael García Bernal, de Armas has a smaller role, but she proves that sometimes less is more.