LAS VEGAS – Ana de Armas sobbed the first time she set a guy on fire.
Her assassin character in the “John Wick” franchise spinoff “Ballerina” (in theaters June 6) uses all manner of weaponry when dealing with various villains, including a flamethrower. Before filming a rather fiery sequence, de Armas had a harrowing moment rehearsing with a stuntman where she felt the reality of the fiction they were creating.
“He’s standing in front of me and I'm like, ‘OK, easy. Just going to do it,’ and, of course, he's performing,” de Armas recalls. “But I dropped the thing and started crying because he is burning. It was not a good image.
“I had to unzip the (fireproof) onesie that they put on me and go for a walk. He came and showed me he was OK. But the first impression was really intense. I was not prepared for that. And then I burned like 106 people,” she adds with a proud smile.
After "little tastes" of action in “Ghosted” and “The Gray Man,” plus one memorable sequence in the James Bond movie “No Time to Die,” de Armas, 37, wanted more in her movie career. The Oscar-nominated actress got way more with “Ballerina.”
