Anora has raised Mikey Madison to a new echelon in Hollywood. Photo / Caroline Tompkins, The New York Times
The soft-spoken actress is winning raves (and Oscar talk) for her turn as a feisty sex worker in the Palme d’Or-winning Anora.
Mikey Madison, by her own admission, cries a lot. Whether she’s happy or sad, that’s how she expresses herself.
During our conversation at a midtown Manhattan restaurant, the star of the Palme d’Or-winning Anora told me a number of stories that involved weeping. She cried on the way home from a horseback-riding competition when she was a teenager and realised she would have to choose between life as an equestrian or an actor. (She was too single-minded to do both.) She cried after every single acting class in the early days of her career. She cried after her first Russian language session in preparation for this latest role.
But when she was living in the Brooklyn neighbourhood of Brighton Beach to shoot Anora, Sean Baker’s film about a tough-as-nails sex worker who impulsively marries a Russian oligarch’s son, she found that the tears didn’t come easily. “I was, like, holding it in in a way that I hadn’t done before,” she recalled. “And I was like, ‘Am I numb? What’s happening here?’” She ultimately realised it was something different: the title character, known as Ani, was taking hold of her in a way that had never happened in her career. She had heard fellow actors talk about that kind of thing but had never related to it before.
It makes sense that Ani would exert a certain power over Madison, because Anora is a monumental film in the 25-year-old’s career. Although she had memorable parts in the movies Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood (2019) and Scream (2022) and a crucial role on Better Things, the critically acclaimed FX series, Anora raises her to a new echelon in Hollywood. Almost as soon as the film premiered at Cannes, Madison was given the “star is born” treatment and declared a potential Oscar nominee. When Anora hit the Telluride Film Festival a few months later, a producer told Variety, “I need to work with Mikey Madison ASAP”.
The film begins one night at her strip club gig, when her boss instructs her to talk to a patron, Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), who asked for a Russian-speaking girl. Turns out he’s wildly rich, and their whirlwind romance leads to a quickie marriage. But when his parents learn of it and send heavies to arrange their annulment, Ani refuses to go quietly. She fights off men twice her size with piercing screams and shockingly powerful kicks. For all that ferociousness, Madison also conveys how Ani’s thick skin is a form of self-defence against a world that rewards those, like Ivan, with easy access to money and finds new ways to punish those who don’t. Over the course of the action, you watch exhaustion seep into her face, which once glowed with the possibility of a fairy-tale ending.
While onscreen Madison plays brash characters and cool girls who can be maniacally villainous – she’s been set on fire in two different movies – off-screen, she’s disarmingly sweet, with a soft-spoken air. At the beginning of our interview, sitting in a cosy sweater, she announced she was visiting later that day with a bunny owned by one of the publicists for Anora. She seemingly sensed how caught off-guard I was by this comment.
“I just thought I would mention it because I’m so excited to meet Cashew the bunny that I wanted to share,” she said, adding, “Having the animal time is nice.”
Knowing her work, I was surprised by her demeanour, and Baker was too when he met her. The director had first clocked Madison when she showed up in the finale of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood as a Manson family member sneering and cackling about killing TV stars with terrifying glee. Baker watched the movie three times in the theatre. After he saw her in Scream, he contacted her agent.
He obviously wasn’t expecting her to be a bloodthirsty murderer, but he was still taken aback by just how different she was from the person onscreen.
“When she sat down,” he said in an interview, she was in a sundress, quiet, reserved. “It was like, ‘Oh, my God, you weren’t typecast’.
“As soon as I saw that,” he added, “I was like, ‘Oh, she can go to those places, even though she’s very not that person.’”
Madison first turned to acting as a way to break out of her shell. She grew up in the Woodland Hills area of Los Angeles, the daughter of psychologists, and from a young age, she struggled with what she called debilitating shyness.
“I just saw these actors having these deep, emotional, intimate connections or experiences on film, and it was so moving and meaningful to me, and I thought, ‘That looks fun,’ or, ‘That looks like a safe place to explore all of those things without having to do it in real life.’”
Before deciding she was interested in acting around the age of 14, inspired by Molly Ringwald movies, she had dedicated herself to training as an equestrian, even choosing to be home-schooled so she could spend entire days at the barn. Animals were, and still are, her safe space. (She lives in Los Angeles with two rescues – a Chihuahua mix named Jam and a regal-looking cat named Biscuit – and dreams of one day owning a rescue ranch.)
After she committed to acting, she threw herself into that with the fervour she did for riding. Her mother suggested she start out in community theatre, but Madison wanted to try for film and television, even though initially, she barely made eye contact with other people.
At 16, she started her breakout role as the surly teenage daughter Max in Better Things. Pamela Adlon, who starred in and helped create that series, said in a phone interview that at the start, Madison was green but eager to acquire knowledge: “The thing about her is that she wants to learn and know, so she was my clay, and she was a sponge.”
Her collaborators note that Madison has a studiousness to her. Tyler Gillett, who codirected her in Scream with Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, described her as a listener. “She’s paying attention, I think, on a different level, and I think she’s absorbing the world around her in a different way,” he said.
Even just working together for a week in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, she was “flexible and committed and curious and hungry,” her co-star Maya Hawke wrote in an email.
Anora gave Madison the chance to apply that almost scholarly approach to her work. Although Baker had the general idea for Anora before Madison came on board, once she was cast, he started writing it with her in mind, asking for her opinions on the character as he went.
“The first day we met, he was like, ‘Is there anything you want to do in this movie? Do you have any talents?’ And I had no answer because I’ve never been asked that question as an actor by a director, and I was kind of speechless,” she remembered. “I think at that point, I hadn’t quite gained my voice yet or had the confidence to share my ideas and my opinions.”
Eventually, she warmed up to the idea. One of her suggestions? “More brawl, the better” in the fight scenes.
To become Ani, Madison read memoirs by sex workers, gravitating toward Andrea Werhun’s Modern Whore, which she said she underlined and bookmarked. (Werhun was a consultant on the film.) She watched everything about the lives of strippers she could get her hands on, including documentaries and YouTube videos. In addition to speaking with the consultants on the film, she went to strip clubs in Los Angeles and New York, where she observed and even received a couple of dances.
“I was convinced she was Anora, and I was looking forward to it,” Baker said, “but I didn’t know she was going to these places.”
“Honestly,” he added, “taking three months of pole dancing lessons for 20 seconds on the pole.”
About that: Madison was intent on hanging upside down in a brief scene, and when one teacher said she would never be able to do that, she wasn’t dissuaded, training with a coach, Kennady Schneider, and even installing a pole in her living room to practise.
Every facet of the character meant another opportunity for a deep dive. She studied Russian for the times her character speaks in an admittedly poor accent. “I thought I was never going to be able to master this, and so I was like, I’m going to dedicate every waking moment to listening to Russian,” she said. She would even fall asleep to recordings of the language.
About a month before shooting, she moved into an apartment in Brighton Beach with her cat to further perfect Ani’s Brooklyn accent and visit more clubs.
“She understood her character so much by the time we were shooting that I could rely on her improv being on point and actually delivering in terms of exposition,” Baker said.
Madison also was not intimidated by the movie’s frequent nudity and sex scenes. Because of her trust in Baker, she declined to work with an intimacy coordinator, though she looks forward to working with one on a “case-by-case basis,” she said.
She particularly liked filming the improvised lap dance scenes, in which she got to explore the psychology of being a dancer trying to establish a quick connection with a client.
“I was always comfortable, and I also think because Ani was too. To me, it was never a thought in my head to be nervous or anything,” she said.
That’s not to say that Madison didn’t push herself. The most nerve-racking scene was the movie’s soul-baring finale. To get herself to that emotionally raw place, she listened to an old voicemail from her father. It was a little embarrassing when Baker played it aloud for her co-star.
Madison remains close with her family, and her twin brother has accompanied her to some festivals. While she refrains from social media, her dad “stalks” her online. “He must be following a bunch of things, because he’ll text me like, ‘Oh, I saw this,’ or, ‘I liked you wearing this,’ and I’m like, ‘What do you mean?’” she said.
Her family, who aren’t in the entertainment industry, is trying to understand the awards season whirlwind she’s now caught up in. Madison herself also doesn’t fully comprehend the attention she’s now receiving.
“I would understand a curiosity toward a character in film, but that’s never been something I’ve really understood – like, the curiosity towards the actor themselves,” she said.
While Baker said he thought that Madison had the potential to become the next Margot Robbie or Emma Stone – “the talent’s there, the looks are there, the determination is there” – he also noted that she’s relatively off the grid for a young Hollywood star. Hence, the lack of an Instagram (or really any) account. “She’s not seduced by it at all,” he said; she’s interested in living in “the real world and nature”.
For now, she’s looking for another role that she can connect with as much as Ani and a filmmaker who will inspire her as much as Baker. She’s also considering playing someone more like herself.
“I don’t think I’ve ever played a character that feels close to home, which is something I’ve been thinking about recently that I’m interested in doing,” she said. “I don’t know what it would feel like or what the character would look like.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Esther Zuckerman
Photographs by: Caroline Tompkins
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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