I Love and Support a Cuban Marilyn Monroe

She’s here! She’s blonde! She has an accent that can only be described as vaguely Cuban! That’s right, ladies and germs, we have a full trailer for Andrew Dominik’s Blonde, in which Ana de Armas plays famous American Marilyn Monroe as a woman who, much like de Aramas, was born in Havana.

I will take some time now to preempt the media-illiterate tweets about how Monroe’s mother was Mexican and that a Monroe with an accent is actually closer to real life. It’s not. Monroe’s mother, Gladys Pearl Baker, was born in Mexico, but her parents migrated there from Arkansas looking for work, and the family moved to California a year after Gladys’s birth. Let’s not do discourse where none is necessary.

That being said, I am embracing de Armas’s Monroe with love and light. She, Dominik, and a crack team of makeup artists and wig stylists have done an incredible job of making her look like Monroe. And, based solely on two minutes and eight seconds of trailer, I have decided that the Deep Water actress is doing a fabulous job of embodying the blonde bombshell. That’s movie magic for ya.

So who cares if de Armas has a Cuban lilt? Did you watch Under the Banner of Heaven? Someone let Daisy Edgar Jones play an Idaho Mormon while sounding like a member of the royal family. The American accent is grating and hard to nail; I do not fault these women for coming up short.

De Armas herself described the process of trying to do an American accent as “a big torture,” saying that it left her brain “fried.” I can only imagine — Lady Gaga spent a year and a half trying to do an Italian accent for House of Gucci, and the best she could come up with was “what if Buca Di Beppo was a person.”

Blonde itself is based on Joyce Carol Oates’s fictionalized retelling of Monroe’s story, so who really cares how “accurate” everything is? We are not here for a pitch-perfect dialect, we are here to watch a beautiful but troubled woman come apart at the seams. That can sound like anything.