Two fans of No Time to Die star Ana de Armas have started legal action against the studio behind the Richard Curtis-scripted comedy Yesterday, claiming they were duped into renting it after the US trailer contained a brief glimpse of her despite her character having been cut out of the finished film.
A class action lawsuit was filed on 21 January in a California court by Conor Woulfe and Peter Michael Rosza alleging that Universal Pictures, the film’s US distributors, were “false, misleading, and deceptive” for releasing the trailer for the film, on which both claimants said they subsequently each spent $3.99 to watch on Amazon.
Yesterday stars Himesh Patel as a singer-songwriter who, after a mysterious global electrical blackout, is the only person who remembers the Beatles (and their songs); De Armas appears for a few seconds in the trailer while Patel sings the Beatles’ 1969 hit Something. In 2019 Curtis told CinemaBlend that her character was cut because test audiences felt that it undermined the central romance between Patel’s Jack and Lily James’s character Ellie. “‘[De Armas] was brilliant … And [that] turned out to be the problem [as] the audience did not like the fact that his eyes even strayed. Because then some people would go, ‘Oh, he really doesn’t deserve her. He really doesn’t deserve Lily.’”
The lawsuit claims that Patel and James were “largely unknown” actors and that the distributors “could not rely on their fame to promote the movie to entice viewership” and instead “used Ms De Armas’s fame, radiance and brilliance to promote the film … Ms De Armas, in contrast to the actors playing Jack Malik or Ellie, is famous and is a viewership draw by herself.”
De Armas, who was born in Cuba, plays CIA agent Paloma in the current James Bond release No Time to Die, and previously gained attention as the hologram Joi in Blade Runner 2049.
Universal has been contacted for comment.