‘Ballerina’: Ana de Armas faces Keanu Reeves in ‘John Wick’ spinoff
Ana de Armas plays a dancer-turned-assassin on a mission of revenge and Keanu Reeves makes an appearance as John Wick in the action movie “Ballerina.”
LAS VEGAS– Ana de Armas has a tense faceoff with Keanu Reeves in the action-packed “John Wick” flick “Ballerina.” It’s not the first time they’ve butted heads on camera: Ten years ago, she was making his domestic life hell in the thriller “Knock Knock.”
Even in those early days of the Keanussance, de Armas felt a connection with Reeves. “I’ve always admired him so much. just the way he approaches the business and his career, and just mostly how he treats people,” she says. “I met him when he had just done the first ‘John Wick.’ We never imagined this is what the franchise was going to be.”
“Ballerina” (in theaters June 6) marks the first big-screen spinoff for the popular “Wick” series. While she does share the screen with the main man himself, de Armas – the first female winner of CinemaCon’s action star of the year award – is very much the star of the movie. Her character Eve Macarro is a rookie dancer/assassin who comes up, like Wick, in the Ruska Roma organization, and Eve irks the wrong people when she goes on a mission of revenge.
“The opportunity to have my movie and actually just go for it, go crazy, it was a no-brainer,” says de Armas, 36, an Oscar-nominated actress who’s had action roles in “Ghosted,” “The Gray Man” and the James Bond movie “No Time to Die.” “I knew I wanted to be a part of that world, and that specific tone of ‘John Wick’ was really cool.”
“Ballerina” marks de Armas’ third movie with Reeves – they also co-starred in the 2016 thriller “Exposed” – and he’s as inspiring a presence as ever, she says. “Keanu is just relentless. It’s never enough. He’s very perfectionist, he wants to get it right. During rehearsals, every step of the way, he was down for everything. Any idea, he’s happy to try everything. That kind of just giving yourself to the process and the project, it’s just remarkable.”
They share multiple scenes in the movie, as Eve asks for advice from Wick in the early days of her killer career, but Wick warns her of the “consequences” of her actions. De Armas teases a sequence glimpsed in the trailer where Wick is sent after her and he walks quietly through a snowy town at night.
“I think this is the first time in history that no one is trying to kill him. He is actually looking around like, ‘I’ve never been so calm walking down the street,’ ” de Armas says. “When they face each other, you can tell that these characters have so much in common. And you really don’t know what’s going to happen, who’s going to hurt who.”
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