There is a door that separates celebrities from civilians, leaving those of us curious enough to peer through the keyhole with an incomplete idea of fame. Here, for example, is the keyhole version of Ana de Armas, the 31-year-old breakout star of last year’s Knives Out: She darts across the dining room of Versailles, the Culver City outpost of Miami’s famed Cuban restaurant, like she’s trying to shave a few seconds off her time. It’s the day before the Golden Globes, and she has just come from a facial, which puts one in mind of a butler polishing already gleaming silverware. What is here for an esthetician to excavate I do not know. De Armas has been nominated for her portrayal of Marta Cabrera, the moral compass of the whodunit ensemble, and while she will not win the award, she will win the red carpet in a navy sequined Ralph & Russo gown, a crystalline Snow White with borderline anime eyes. As the lights flicker above us, she smiles and says, “Just like Cuba.” Oh, but de Armas’s light shows no signs of dimming!

End of keyhole.

It’s impossible, right? To capture a whole person, to understand someone else’s life without context. I don’t see this moment and I’m in the middle of it. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to, and by the time I can, it will have changed.”

Freshly yet firmly on the other side of fame’s door, de Armas is in the rare position to fling it open, to be frank about what it means to be in the spotlight, to have your life reduced to a stereotype, to be sick of Los Angeles (by the time you read this, she’ll be gone). Just a few years ago she was spending seven hours a day sitting in a classroom, learning to speak English, which she did in four months. Now she’s one of Hollywood’s most efficient multitaskers: She’s about to appear in No Time to Die, the 25th James Bond movie, in a role conceived for her by Cary Joji Fukunaga and written (mostly) by Phoebe Waller-Bridge; she stars in the upcoming erotic thriller Deep Water with Ben Affleck, directed by Adrian Lyne, as well as in The Night Clerk, with Helen Hunt, and in Netflix’s political drama Sergio; she will be going back to her roots (she was a towheaded child) to become Marilyn Monroe in Blonde. The fact that her earlier work alongside Ryan Gosling (Blade Runner 2049) and Keanu Reeves (twice, Exposed and Knock Knock) is already so far down her IMDB page is fairly astounding. So how did she get here?

Beans, partly.

“I am so excited for this food,” she says, tearing apart a piece of bread you could wring butter out of, “which is crazy, because I just came from two weeks in Cuba. This is my fuel.”

De Armas owns a home in Havana, where the majority of her friends and family still live. Two minutes in her company invokes easy images of a dreamlike Havana. She spent New Year’s at a “roof party in the old part of Havana, playing music and dancing and drinking.” But things are more complicated than they seem. That party was full of actors she’s long admired “who said how proud they were, and that now I was the example for Cuban actors.” She cries just recounting it. Her parents have never been able to attend one of her film premieres. They see her work “later, like a bad copy or something.” In what should be satire, some L.A. acquaintances have gone so far as to tell her they envy the “digital detox” of Cuba or the fun of “not knowing what you’re going to eat for breakfast.” When the country was briefly open during the Obama administration, she heard concerns it would be overrun by Starbucks—“Americans complain about something existing, but then when they don’t have it, they also complain.” Consider her answer to “What are you wearing?” which should be the celebrity equivalent of spelling your name correctly on the SATs:

“I don’t have any clothing.”

“Come again?”

“I came straight from Havana, so I’ve been wearing my plane clothes. My suitcases go full of clothing or medicine or supplies—whatever people need—and come back empty. My stylist gave me this Saint Laurent suit so I’d look cool. I don’t wear this in real life.”

For the record, she does have clothing. It’s just all in New Orleans, where she’s filming Deep Water. And, for the record, Hollywood is “not my life, it’s my reality.”

“I have great friends, and incredible things have happened for me here, but the lifestyle and the exposure and the constant business situations are not for me. I like talking about life and art and babies and pets. Acting is what I love to do, but I can’t talk about it, not all the time.” Or, to quote Marilyn Monroe: “It’s good to have caviar but not when you have it at every meal.” Beans, maybe. But not caviar.

Thus de Armas is moving back to Havana for now, half an hour from the beach town where she grew up. As a kid, she didn’t sneak into the city because “it’s a big deal to go when you don’t have transportation.” Instead, she and her friends entertained themselves and the neighbors by acting, dancing, and singing (she was Baby Spice in an adorably amateur Spice Girls cover band but didn’t understand the lyrics to “Wannabe” until she heard it on the radio a few years ago). Eventually, her parents enrolled her in theater school. (“I would hitchhike every single morning, just stand next to the stoplight, where the cars have to stop anyway, go to the window, and tell people where I needed to go.”) But American films weren’t a glimmer in her eye, mostly because she couldn’t see herself in them.

“I would see the houses and airplanes and all the money and people robbing banks and it clearly wasn’t real, just the way princesses weren’t real. It was fantasy. The Cuban actors were the ones I was looking at because that was my reality—people getting in a boat or screaming at one another or killing a pig.”

De Armas left for Madrid at 18, as soon she legally could, only able to because her maternal grandparents are Spanish. There, things fell into place quickly. She got an agent through a movie she’d made two years prior “and then got lucky and a week later, a casting director called.” De Armas starred in El Internado (The Boarding School), which was “a massive hit, a little like Stranger Things.” Only after she felt like she’d outgrown it both creatively (she felt “uninspired”) and practically (she was still playing a teenager) did she come to the States. I find it difficult to imagine that Hollywood wasn’t the endgame, given how well she’s taken to it and it to her. (As Bobby Finger put it about de Armas on the Who? Weekly podcast: “[It’s funny]…when someone’s like, ‘This talented woman is about to be everywhere,’ and then you look at them and you’re like, ‘Yeah, no shit.’ ”) But, as de Armas reminds me, context is key. Hers was “one of the few Cuban families with no one in Miami even. The conversation was always Spain.”

“People ask ‘How did you make this choice or that?’ But there was only ever one choice at a time. I’ve never seen my life in two ways, the way I wanted it and plan B. There was only ever the way I wanted it.”

One gets the sense there’s not a lot out of de Armas’s reach. Her Knives Out costar Jamie Lee Curtis had no idea who she was when they met. In a scene straight out of Notting Hill, she says she “thought Ana was this piece of unmolded clay and I asked her about her goals like I’m talking to a college student, and then I emailed Steven fucking Spielberg, saying his casting department should really look into this woman, as if she didn’t even have an agent.” A year later, Curtis is in a better position to assess her friend’s determination: “She is remarkable. She’s going to be like Sophia Loren, one of those rare crossover worldwide sensations. She’s got this exquisite depth and is singularly gentle and insanely beautiful, but also she is a girl from Cuba so there’s that tenacity and perseverance and fierceness to her.”

Such depth of characterization was absent from the initial description of de Armas’s Knives Out character. Marta was boiled down to: “Latina caretaker, pretty” and de Armas almost didn’t take the part.

She points out that Latina actors are still frequently pigeonholed using words like sensuality and fire.

“Or else it’s ‘sexy with a temper.’ And it’s who we are. There’s nothing wrong with it so long as it’s not only that. That’s what I have a problem with.”

“You mean you don’t wake up every morning, put on a short skirt, and start screaming at people?”

“Oh, well, yeah, I do that until I get exhausted, and then I put a basket of fruit on my head and say, ‘Go fuck yourself,’ and then I take a break and do it again.”

As much as she avoids stereotyping in her work, she thinks that it has, on occasion, been useful behind the scenes, particularly in a pre-#MeToo Hollywood. She credits her parents for teaching her “about men and boundaries and how to speak out” and describes herself as “quick and capable and I-don’t-give-a-shit.” And while she considers herself lucky to have worked with “gracious and proper human beings,” she admits that “the Cuban thing helps.”

“How so?”

She narrows her eyes, waves her finger, and makes a tsk-tsk noise like she’s watching a dog contemplate bad behavior.

When de Armas arrived in L.A., she “demanded” her agents send her out to auditions, telling them she didn’t come to Hollywood to get a degree in English. If there’s a story already associated with de Armas, it’s this one: She did it all phonetically. On the set of War Dogs, in which she plays Miles Teller’s girlfriend, director Todd Phillips “changed a line of dialogue and it was a disaster. In the end he was like, ‘Okay, forget it, just say what you had.’ It’s not a good place to be as an actor. I couldn’t sustain a conversation.”

“The first time I read for a part, I had no clue what ‘I beg your pardon’ was,” she remembers, laughing, “I thought it was really angry, like ‘I beg your pardon!’ Like I am going to take your pardon. And every person in the room was like, ‘She has no clue what she’s saying right now.’ But the thing is, I knew exactly what was happening in the scene. It was a crazy combination of ‘She has no clue’ and ‘She’s doing it.’ ”

Like all actors, fresh and seasoned alike, de Armas has nothing but diplomatic adjectives for her projects and costars, but she absolutely beams when she talks about Blonde, adapted from Joyce Carol Oates’s Pulitzer-nominated fictionalization of Norma Jeane Baker and directed by Andrew Dominik.

“I only had to audition for Marilyn once and Andrew said ‘It’s you,’ but I had to audition for everyone else. The producers. The money people. I always have people I needed to convince. But I knew I could do it. Playing Marilyn was groundbreaking. A Cuban playing Marilyn Monroe. I wanted it so badly.”

Before the script came her way, her knowledge of Monroe was limited to a few iconic roles and photos, but now she’s become a human conveyor belt of fun facts. Even her dog, Elvis, plays Monroe’s dog in the film. (“His name was Mafia. Sinatra gave him to her. Of course.”) She also identifies with Monroe in a more profound way: “You see that famous photo of her and she is smiling in the moment, but that’s just a slice of what she was really going through at the time.”

“I have never worked more closely with a director than I worked with Andrew. Yes, I have had collaborative relationships, but to get phone calls at midnight because he has an idea and he can’t sleep and all of a sudden you can’t sleep for the same reason…”

“I remember when she showed me a video of her screen tests for Blonde,” says Curtis, whose father starred with Monroe in Some Like It Hot. “I dropped to the floor. I couldn’t believe it. Ana was completely gone. She was Marilyn.”

After months of immersive prep work, it seemed like nothing could tear her away from her Marilyn love affair. But who among us has not had our head turned by James Bond?

No time to die director Cary Joji Fukunaga, who’s been a fan of de Armas for years, wrote the role of Paloma “specifically for Ana, adding a layer of humor to the character that I hadn’t seen her do yet—which I thought might be fun.”

He too is quick to offer adjectives accounting for de Armas’s appeal (confidence, humor, a can-do attitude), but at the end of the day, “it’s intangible. People either have that magic quality you want to watch or they don’t. She has it. If you could quantify it, you could probably sell it.”

Despite the tailor-made invitation to 007’s world, de Armas wanted to be sure she was not doing Bond for Bond’s sake.

“Obviously I was jumping all over the place and very excited. But I needed to be sure it wouldn’t jeopardize all the work I’d been putting in, that it wouldn’t ruin everything. And the Bond women have always been, for me at least, unrelatable.”

Her concerns were valid. In addition to rumors of writer musical chairs and on-set mishaps—as The Independent put it, “Has there been a more fraught Bond production than No Time to Die?”—this is the first Bond film of the Time’s Up era. Yet it’s not the first time the franchise has attempted to address sexism. Historically, this effort comes in the form of giving “Bond girls” nonsensically rarefied degrees and character names that exist to support a single pun. See also: “I thought Christmas only comes once a year.” Zing. “Bond girl” can be as reductive as “Latina caretaker, pretty.”

“I don’t even call them Bond girls,” says Daniel Craig. “I’m not going to deny it to anybody else. It’s just I can’t have a sensible conversation with somebody if we’re talking about ‘Bond girls.’ ”

Craig was first struck by Ana’s performance in Blade Runner 2049, so his reaction to her being cast alongside him in Knives Out and No Time to Die was similarly enthusiastic.

“I should always be so lucky to work with a woman like that. This is a movie where there’s a lot of shit going on, a lot of big acting, myself very much included, but she shines through because she’s the real deal. She’s got very good comic timing and we’re not offering her a huge part. But she came in and just nailed it. She had very little to go on, the scripts are being rewritten, you’re changing things all the time or throwing them at her, and she’s not fazed by it.”

Looks like someone doesn’t have to beg anyone’s pardon anymore. Zing.

“You could also tell that Phoebe was in there,” says de Armas. “There was that humor and spikiness so specific to her. My character feels like a real woman. But you know, we can evolve and grow and incorporate reality, but Bond is a fantasy. In the end you can’t take things out of where they live.”

“There wasn’t any other choice,” explains longtime Bond producer Barbara Broccoli, sounding as laser-visioned as de Armas herself. “It was Ana we all wanted.”

Between Barbara and her father, the legendary “Cubby” Broccoli, they have produced 25 Bond films. Her hold music is Shirley Bassey’s “Diamonds Are Forever.”

“Her character is someone who’s just started working for the CIA, and so she’s supposed to have minimal training when she first meets Bond. The expectation is that she’s not going to be the most proficient agent, but let’s just say that she really packs a punch.”

As refreshing as de Armas is, it would be a mistake to think of her as a babe in these tinsel-strung woods. This is an assumption she herself goes back and forth on, sometimes hitting the gas of savvy movie star and sometimes the brakes of vulnerability: “I’m like a fish out of water.” The big-picture version of her is less like her Knives Out character in her first scene and more like her in the movie’s last shot—the kindhearted woman who got drawn into a game she didn’t necessarily want to play but still won.

When the lights flicker again in the restaurant and waiters sing feliz cumpleaños a ti to a neighboring table, she decides, “Ah, so not just like Cuba, too bad.” She means for this interview in the same way that, when she gamely suggests we get a drink, she orders a daiquiri because a mojito is “too Hemingway, too obvious.” When she first got to L.A., she met producer Colleen Camp while with her agent in the CAA parking garage. Camp then introduced her to Broccoli, which led her to No Time to Die. It’s true that de Armas’s success, equal parts artistry and necessity, has been achieved through the kind of determination few in her position have come by so honestly.

“People ask, ‘How did you learn English so quickly?’ I’m like, ‘Because my life depended on it.’”

But can’t it also be true that she is not alone, that the industry machinery has been trying to position her as the next Penélope Cruz since War Dogs? Can’t it also be true that she’s actually quite entrenched in Caviar Town, USA? She was a pre-implosion Weinstein Company starlet, starring in 2016’s Hands of Stone. Early in her L.A. life, she was in a serious relationship with agent Franklin Latt, heir apparent to Kevin Huvane at CAA. As her name recognition has spread, she’s become no stranger to paparazzi or dating gossip—the fundamentals of American visibility. Perhaps, so close to the other side of fame’s door, such realities can seem like potential liabilities to discuss.

We don’t get into names, but about her personal life, she says, succinctly: “I’ve had company here, but it’s been the wrong company so I prefer to be alone.”

“For anyone who ever questions or how did I get to do this or that, fuck them. They will not get to spend their New Year’s with me. They are not the people whose opinion I should care about. They are not the people I share my happiness with. I’ve never had an agenda. All I want to do is work. All I want to do is get something challenging and prove to myself that I can do it.”

We are both full of beans. And rum. Outside, the sky has turned orange, perhaps a more worthy backdrop for a rooftop in Havana than the middle of Venice Boulevard. The restaurant lights flicker for a fourth time and we silently agree that we are all feliz cumpleaños’d out. No matter what happens at the awards tomorrow night, de Armas knows she will remember it as one wonderful evening during “this moment in time that might, that will, keep changing.” As we head for the door, she flings a suede leopard-print YSL bag over her shoulder. I stop her.

“Wow, your stylist really did hook you up.”

“No, no,” she smiles, “This one’s mine.” I tell her I’d be worried I’d destroy it. “Oh, you can’t be,” she says, going back out the way she came in. “Life is for living.”

HAIR BY WARD; MAKEUP BY FRANK B.; MANICURE BY ALEX JACHNO; TAILOR, HASMIK KOURINIAN; SET DESIGN BY JAMES LEAR; PRODUCED ON LOCATION BY JOY ASBURY PRODUCTIONS; FOR DETAILS, GO TO VF.COM/CREDITS