Film

The Cast Of Blonde Versus The Real-Life Figures They Played

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Long before Blonde hit Netflix screens this week, the polarising Marilyn Monroe biopic was surrounded by controversy. Chatter around the film – directed by Australian auteur Andrew Dominik and starring Ana de Armas – first began to pick up in January, when it received a rare NC-17 rating for its graphic depictions of sexual abuse and abortion. The conversations continued after its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September, and the sharply divided critical response that accompanied it. Why, many have asked, does the film focus solely on the toxic and often abusive relationships Monroe had with the men in her life, and not her female friendships or glittering film career? Were the extremely graphic rape scenes really necessary to tell Monroe’s story? And perhaps the most fundamental question of all: Is Dominik’s take on Monroe’s life misogynistic?

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What To Expect From Netflix’s Controversial Marilyn Monroe Biopic Blonde

Ahead of its much-delayed 2022 release, here’s a summary of every major talking point about the film.

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You can make up your own mind about that, as viewers already have after watching the film this week. But if there are two things everyone can agree on about Blonde, it’s that it has an impressively stacked cast and de Armas’s performance as Monroe is a knockout. Also making appearances are Bobby Cannavale as “the ex-athlete,” a stand-in for Monroe’s second husband, baseball star Joe DiMaggio, and Adrien Brody as a character named “the playwright,” widely acknowledged to be Monroe’s third husband, Arthur Miller.

Here, see the Blonde cast side by side with the real-life figures from history they played. 

Norma Jeane (Marilyn Monroe): Ana de Armas

Photos: Getty Images

To fully inhabit the role of Monroe, Cuban actor de Armas reportedly spent up to three hours a day in the make-up chair over the film’s 47-day shoot and worked for months with a coach to perfect Monroe’s famously breathy vocal intonation. The results, it’s safe to say, were worth the effort. 

The Playwright (Arthur Miller): Adrien Brody

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The tragic tale of Monroe’s doomed romance with her third husband, playwright Arthur Miller, is brought to vivid life thanks to Brody, who has described the process of capturing their turbulent relationship as “heartbreaking”.

The Ex-Athlete (Joe DiMaggio): Bobby Cannavale

Photos: Getty Images

It’s hard to think of a better pick for the role of Joe DiMaggio – the straight-talking Italian American baseball legend – than Cannavale. The story of Monroe’s relationship with DiMaggio, which ended with Monroe going to the courts to ask for a divorce due to the latter’s “mental cruelty”, makes for one of the film’s most devastating chapters.

Charles Chaplin Jr: Xavier Samuel 

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If Xavier Samuel looks familiar, it may well be because you saw him in another biopic of a cultural legend earlier this year: He played the guitarist Scotty Moore in Baz Luhrman’s Elvis. In Blonde, he transforms into Charles Chaplin Jr – the son of the famous silent film actor – who allegedly shared a brief dalliance with Monroe in the late 1940s.

Gladys Pearl Baker: Julianne Nicholson

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Julianne Nicholson’s chameleonic skills as an actor have seen her take on a wide range of characters, including a put-upon mother in Mare of Easttown last year. For Blonde, she revamps her appearance once again to play Monroe’s mother, Gladys Pearl Baker, with whom the actor had a notoriously troubled relationship.

The President (John F Kennedy): Caspar Phillipson

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Did Marilyn Monroe truly have an affair with president John F Kennedy? Nobody will ever truly know, but Dominik’s film – adapted from Joyce Carol Oates’s book of the same name that played fast and loose with the hard facts of Monroe’s life – seems to think so, with de Armas’s Monroe sharing a brief tryst with Kennedy’s doppelgänger, Caspar Phillipson.

Jack Lemmon: Chris Lemmon

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Perhaps Blonde’s greatest casting masterstroke was convincing Chris Lemmon, the son of screen legend (and Monroe’s Some Like It Hot co-star) Jack Lemmon, to play his own father. You don’t have to worry about spending hours in the make-up chair to achieve a perfect resemblance when it’s in your very DNA, after all.