Ana de Armas looks back on her relationship with Ben Affleck, which was intensely captured and gossiped about by paparazzi and the media.

The constant attention made the actress feel “horrible” and was one of the reasons why she left L.A., she tells Elle for the magazine’s August 2022 cover story.

The “Knives Out” star lived in the city for seven years, witnessing how other performers navigated public attention, but experiencing it herself confirmed her thoughts about it: This is not the place for me to be.

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“It became a little bit too much,” de Armas says. “There’s no escape. There’s no way out.”

She tells Elle how Los Angeles kept her “anxious” because there is “always the feeling of something that you don’t have, something missing.”

De Armas, 34, and Affleck, 49, dated during the coronavirus pandemic and quarantined together. They were often photographed while walking their dogs together or on coffee runs. The former couple and “Deep Water” co-stars called it quits in January 2021, after nearly a year together.

De Armas, who began her career as a Latin actress in Cuba and Spain, hopes to show that “we [Latin actors] can do anything if we’re given the time to prepare.” She adds that, if given the chance, “you can do any film – ‘Blonde’ – you can do anything.”

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The Cuban-Spanish actress embodies the honourable role of Marilyn Monroe in the upcoming film “Blonde”.

The actress wants to carve her own path in Hollywood, playing women whose defining characteristics go beyond their ethnicity. pic.twitter.com/EKG3Ct7msQ

— ELLE Magazine (US) (@ELLEmagazine) July 13, 2022

De Armas also stars in the summer action movie “The Gray Man” with Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans, reportedly the biggest-budget film Netflix has ever made. Evans, her friend and three-time co-star (“The Gray Man”, “Knives Out”, and the forthcoming project “Ghosted”) says the actress is someone “you can’t stop watching [on camera].” He adds that de Armas has an ” incredibly wide” range from power to vulnerability.

“She can go from almost dangerous to exposed and gentle and soft in one scene,” Evans complimented the rising star.

De Armas’s August 2022 Elle cover issue hits newsstands July 26.