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.

STRONG BOND

Ana de Armas, photographed in Beverly Hills. Dress by Valentino. Photographs by Cass Bird. Styled by Samira Nasr.

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: