Actor Ana de Armas was born in Havana, Cuba in 1988. She knew from a young age that her calling was to be a performer, and at age 12 she enrolled at the National Theater School of Cuba. After four years of study, de Armas appeared in her first film, 2006's "Una rosa de Francia" (2006). She would rack up a small handful of additional roles in her native Cuba before a family connection gave her a new opportunity. Her Spanish heritage through her grandparents gave de Armas dual citizenship with Spain, enabling her to circumvent Cuba's strict and often impossible process to secure an exit visa. In Spain, de Armas joined the casts of popular series like "El internado" (Antena 3 Televisión , 2007-2010) and "Hispania, la leyenda" (Antena 3 Televisión, 2010-12), and in films like the horror-comedy "Faraday" (2013) before setting her sights on Hollywood. de Armas was well aware that she would be starting over without any of the name recognition she'd built up in Cuba and Spain, but she persevered, soon landing a role alongside Keanu Reeves in the Eli Roth directed thriller "Knock Knock" (2015). The very next year found her staring with Robert De Niro in the boxing film "Hands of Stone." After co-starring in Todd Phillips' Iraq War dark comedy "War Dogs" (2016) and French-made action thriller "Overdrive" (2017), de Armas scored a high-profile role in Denis Villeneuve's eagerly anticipated "Blade Runner 2049" (2017). She has since had roles in such films as the dark comedy mystery, "Knives' Out" (2019), the James Bond film "No Time to Die" (2021) and more recently starred alongside Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans in "The Gray Man" (2022).