The upcoming Netflix Marilyn Monroe film, Blonde (with Ana de Armas playing MM) won’t be the average biopic.
After the film was slapped with an NC-17 rating (making history as Netflix’s first) and made headlines for its rumored sexually explicit content, director Andrew Dominik is warning audiences that everyone will be “offended” by his movie about the iconic starlet.
Dominik teased Blonde in a Q&A with Vulture published today, in which he compared de Armas to the late James Gandolfini, called the film “a little $22 million movie” and admitted he was surprised by Blonde‘s adult rating.
Marilyn Monroe Netflix Film ‘Blonde’ Will “Offend Everyone”
Blonde was originally set to premiere in 2020 before being pushed to September 2022. Reflecting on his film’s impending release, Dominik told Vulture it’s an “interesting time for Blonde to come out,” because if the film had debuted earlier, “it would have come out right when Me Too hit and it would have been an expression of all that stuff.”
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While he said “people are really uncertain about where any lines are” in our current time, Blonde is “a film that definitely has a morality about it.” He added, “But it swims in very ambiguous waters because I don’t think it will be as cut-and-dried as people want to see it. There’s something in it to offend everyone.”
Dominik, who initially blasted Blonde‘s NC-17 rating as “a bunch of horsesh*t,” seemed to have cooled on the issue while speaking to Vulture. He told the outlet that he was “surprised” by the distinction because he thought “we’d colored inside the lines.”
Still, he added, “I think if I’m given the choice, I’d rather go and see the NC-17 version of the Marilyn Monroe story. Because we know that her life was on the edge, clearly, from the way it ended. Do you want to see the warts-and-all version or do you want to see that sanitized version?”