Meet the star of the film that’s creating serious Oscars buzz
Mikey Madison commands the screen in Anora, a next-gen Pretty Woman and this year’s best film.
Halfway through Anora, director Sean Baker’s raucous romantic dramedy, a single scene shifts the balance of the film right off its axis. High on money and sex and all manner of Las Vegas fun, Vanya (Mark Eidelstein), the childishly charming son of an oligarch, bemoans the fact that he will soon have to return to mother Russia and take up the mantle of his family legacy. Unless ... “If I get married to an American, I wouldn’t have to go back,” Vanya murmurs.
“So, who’d you marry?” trills Mikey Madison as Ani, short for Anora, in a Brooklyn accent so loud you can hear it in New Jersey. Vanya fixes her with a look. At first, Ani, a sex worker, deflects his offer with practised playfulness, like someone well-versed in empty promises. Then hope takes root. Cut to a Vegas chapel, a four-carat diamond and an effervescent Take That needle drop. (“Today this could be the greatest day of our lives!”) Baker’s camera spins ebulliently around the pair as they kiss in a crowded mall, a vision of some kind of swoony American dream.
“All of that is live, with real people,” says Madison. Baker is known for peopling his films with non-actors, casting on the street or from Instagram for his movies Tangerine and The Florida Project. “It really felt like we had just gotten married,” Madison laughs. “I don’t think it’s often that an actor gets to experience something like that.”
The sequence is the crucial tipping point of the film. Beforehand, we follow Ani as she meets Vanya while working at a strip club and agrees to be his “horny girlfriend” for the week. Thanks to a grandmother who never learned English, Ani is more fluent in Russian than she lets on, and their relationship is conducted in a muddled bilinguality: half English and half Russian, half paid-for and half given freely. Anora doesn’t so much reference Pretty Woman as it paints over the top of it; when Vanya agrees to pay $15,000 for her company for the week, Ani admits she would have stayed for $10,000. (In Russian, Vanya scoffs that he wouldn’t have accepted anything less than $30,000.) Pretty Woman ends with the fairytale: limousine with the top down, Richard Gere clambering up a fire escape, Julia Roberts rescuing him right back. In Anora, the fairytale is only the beginning. When the wedding is plastered all over the tabloids, Vanya’s parents send in some Home Alone-calibre heavyweights to administer an annulment. And so begins the worst day of Ani’s life.
As Ani, Madison delivers a star-is-born performance after breaking out as one of the Manson murderers in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. “It was a dream come true to do that film,” she remembers. “When I think back on that, I think about the enthusiasm for film and the love that he had for this story he was telling … it reminded me how I want to feel on all my projects.” In May, the 25-year-old was the toast of the Cannes Film Festival, where Anora won the prestigious Palme d’Or and Madison wore Chanel to every event. Sitting on a terrace overlooking the glittering harbour – more superyachts than water – Madison admits she’s still taking it in. “I’m just processing it to be honest,” she says, so quietly it’s difficult to hear her over the crowded clamour of the film festival. As Ani, Madison is brassy and brash, with a loud-mouthed confidence that takes a sharp turn when the reality of her predicament sinks in. In person, Madison is serenely reserved, only really opening up about her love of cooking. “I’ve been baking since I was a kid,” she shares of growing up with four siblings in Los Angeles.
In 2022, Madison starred in the Scream reboot as the blood-chilling Ghostface killer. Baker saw the movie opening weekend, left the cinema and called Madison’s agent. “He had this loose idea for a film,” Madison remembers. “He said, ‘If you’d be interested in doing this, I would write it for you.’” A year later – and months of dance training, observing sex workers and swotting up on Russian – Madison was on set in New York making Anora. “I learned a lot,” she admits, from her time embedded in strip clubs. “I think the biggest thing is how difficult of a job sex work is, and how emotionally and physically demanding it is. You’re manipulating your own emotions to create some kind of chemistry with some person to do your job.” A few of the dancers in the film joined Madison on the Croisette for the premiere. “Some of them came up to me afterwards with tears in their eyes, saying how happy they were with the representation,” she shares. “That, to me, meant more than any other compliment.”
Pretty Woman and Anora share scant DNA; one is a fantasy and one is very much rooted in reality. But both have main characters whose hopefulness is a thing of feathers, perched deep in their soul. Ani’s hope is fragile and tender, something she keeps hidden until Vanya comes along, a reminder of our human capacity to yearn, desperately, for a different kind of life. “She’s someone who is very vulnerable, but constantly covering that with a hardness,” Madison muses. “I love that she is willing to fight tooth and nail for the life she thinks she deserves, and doesn’t want to lose.”
The three-month production was rigorously collaborative, and within that process, freedom. “I’ve done projects where I felt like I was almost a puppet,” she admits, “that I was just dressing exactly the way that they wanted me to dress and saying the lines exactly how they wanted me to say them, and I didn’t feel creative. Working with Sean is amazing, because it’s not that.” Madison remembers shooting an early scene in the strip club.
“I just started improvising some monologues, and talking
and talking and talking,” Madison smiles. “There was a point
where I think it got so ridiculous. I could see the camera
shaking because [the cinematographer] was laughing … I was like, ‘Okay, I don’t know what I’m saying at this point. Maybe
I should take a breather.’” Baker is, Madison says, “a master at creating a story out of any of my chaos”.
Still, it was demanding, requiring high energy every day. “I’m generally more of a low energy kind of person,” Madison whispers, “so I had to really push myself.” For one absolutely mad sequence, in which Ani fights off the goons, Madison put herself through the wars, breaking a nail and injuring her knee. “Any uncomfortability or pain or difficulty I felt is temporary because that’s just how it is,” she reflects. “I welcome those feelings because it means it’s something real that I’m able to show. The film will be forever – any sadness or pain I feel is temporary, and it goes away. And I’m lucky. This is my dream job.”
Anora is in cinemas on December 26.
This story is from the December issue of Vogue Australia, on sale now.
More Coverage
