Mikey Madison: from Tarantino bit part to hot tip for an Oscar playing a sex worker

You know what it’s like: you’ve ordered an important package, but you can’t be at home when it’s delivered so you ask a friend to take it in for you. So it was for Mikey Madison, except the item was a professional-grade dancer’s pole and the person she co-opted to help out was her father. “I was filming a different project,” says the 25-year-old American actor, “and I said, ‘Dad, can you please install this thing in my house?’ He was like, ‘Of course, sweetie.’ And I think it was good I asked him. He had kind of an idea what the film might be, so he was able to watch it and not be completely surprised.”

That film is Anora, in which Madison stars as an exotic dancer called Ani, a performance that’s already generating lots of talk of a best actress Oscar nomination. Ani is working in a Manhattan strip club one night when she is assigned to entertain the playboy son of an oligarch, Ivan, played by Mark Eidelstein (an actor sometimes described, enticingly, as “Russia’s Timothée Chalamet”). They hit it off and Ivan hires Ani for a week, drastically upending her life: she goes from living in a shared apartment, bickering about why there’s no milk in the fridge, to padding around a mansion with a lift, daily maid service and a cryotherapy chamber. In a fever dream of expensive booze and drugs, the new couple descend on Las Vegas where, almost inevitably, they get married in a chintzy chapel: “Fuck yeah, I do,” Ani tells the registrar.

Then, perhaps even more inevitably, it all spectacularly unravels. Ivan’s parents find out about their son’s union and go nuclear. Ani is given the briefest glimpse of a freewheeling new life: she haughtily corrects someone who admires her mink coat – “It’s Russian sable!” – before it is violently wrenched from her grasp. Rarely has the American dream become a nightmare so rapidly and forcefully. “Writer-director Sean Baker provides an acid corrective to so many bogus Hollywood fairytales,” wrote Xan Brooks in his review for this paper after the film’s premiere at Cannes. “Anora sticks Pretty Woman under a UV lamp so that we can see the stains on the sheets and the dirty money that sloshes behind the hotel suites and private jets.”

Anora, which manages to combine a radical social conscience with being laugh-out-loud funny, blew up at last May’s Cannes, where it won the Palme d’Or; Baker became the first American to win the film festival’s top prize since Terrence Malick in 2011. Greta Gerwig, the Barbie director, who was president of the jury, said: “There was something that reminded us of a classic, there were structures of [Ernst] Lubitsch and Howard Hawks. It did something truthful and unexpected … Every single performance we loved.”

Onstage at Cannes, Baker dedicated the award to “sex workers past, present and future – this is for you”.

Baker, who is 53 and from New Jersey, is not grandstanding here: since his breakthrough, Starlet in 2012, he has proved committed to chronicling the everyday realities of porn stars, transgender sex workers and others who work in professions that are misunderstood and often maligned. His films, which include Tangerine (2015), The Florida Project (2017) and Red Rocket (2022), unfailingly give dignity, nuance and humour to those labouring in the underground strata of American life. He told Sight and Sound magazine recently that the characters in his movies were “people who hold their own wherever they go, have street smarts and are scrappy. They won’t necessarily start a fight, but they will know how to fight should they be provoked.”

So it is with Ani in Anora. Baker had been wanting to make a film set in Brighton Beach, a tough area of Brooklyn with a large Russian-speaking community, for more than 15 years, but the idea fell into place in an unexpected way. Watching the reboot of the slasher classic Scream on opening weekend in 2022, he was struck by the actor playing the Ghostface killer. Then he remembered he had seen her before: Madison has a small but eye-catching role – she’s torched by Leonardo DiCaprio with a flame-thrower – in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood. Baker invited Madison for coffee and said he wanted her to take the lead in his new film, which at that point he hadn’t written.

“It comes down to that it factor,” Baker said recently on why he picked Madison. “You just see somebody and instantly know that you want to see more of them or that they deserve to be on the big screen.”

The meeting was life-changing for Madison: Baker’s Tangerine, a buddy comedy about transgender sex workers in LA, which he shot on iPhones, is one of her favourites. “I’ve never had a director see something in me before that made him want to write a script for me,” she says. “And I wondered what Sean saw in me that made him think I could possibly play Ani, because it’s such a departure from my previous work. I almost feel he was blindly trusting me with this character. But it’s a testament to his creative vision, where he’s able to be like, ‘Oh, she can do this, even though I haven’t seen it. I think she can.’”

More than that, Ani is markedly different from Madison herself. “Oh, in every possible way,” she says. “She’s a hustler. She’s constantly going. She says everything that’s on her mind. She’s very boisterous and scrappy and has so much attitude. And she has this incredible fighting spirit that I really admire, and I don’t think that that’s me at all. In terms of energy, I’m a lower-energy person. I just move through the world in a slower manner.”

A year after their first meeting, Baker came back to Madison with a script. She threw herself into the preparations immediately and with fierce intent. Ani is Russian-American and was supposed to speak a smattering of Russian, so Madison started taking lessons, downloaded Duolingo, and took to listening to hours of Russian recordings from when she was making coffee in the morning until she went to sleep. She also moved to Brighton Beach a month before Anora starting shooting to nail that accent.

“I walked away from my first two-hour Russian session and I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m not going to be able to do that,’” she recalls. “I can’t learn a new language for a film. Who does that? That’s insane! I’m a stubborn person, but I am in disbelief that I was able to do it in the end.”

Meanwhile, Baker created a list of books and films on sex work for Madison to immerse herself in. The most influential was the memoir Modern Whore, written in 2018 by the Toronto-based former dancer and escort Andrea Werhun, who became a consultant on Anora. “I really connected to her in a way,” says Madison. “And I thought that Ani could possibly relate to her, because I liked her sense of humour and the way that she was talking about sex work and how she enjoyed it. And I think Ani is someone who enjoys her sexuality and sex, and so it was nice to read that perspective. Yeah, I wanted it to be, like, joyful.”

Then, once Madison’s father had put up the dancer’s pole, came months of physical preparation. Ani spends very little of Anora on the pole – only a few moments – but the scene is a crucial one. “Pole dancing is very physically demanding, in a way I never expected because they make it look so effortless and beautiful and sexy,” she says. “So even if it’s just for a couple of seconds, you see Ani upside down and what she’s able to do, and immediately you have some idea of how long she’s been dancing, how hard she trains. You know she’s a seasoned dancer. All of that adds layers and depth to the character and to that world.”

A recent screening of Anora for sex workers in Los Angeles was a real highlight for Madison. “I definitely felt a responsibility to that community while filming,” she continues. “And the reaction that we got afterwards was incredible, so overwhelmingly positive. People were like, ‘I know your character. She’s my best friend at the club.’ Everyone saw a piece of themselves in the character or in other characters.”

Madison was raised in LA, but her acting origin story is far from the typical one. She lived in the valley, on the rural edges north of the city, and her parents had no connection with entertainment: both are psychologists; her father specialises in schizophrenia and her mother works mostly with children. Madison has two older sisters and two brothers, one of whom is her twin. Before the inevitable question comes, she notes they are not much alike.

“He went to school for mathematics basically, and now he works in finance, so he’s a math guy,” she says. “And physically we look … people thought I was adopted growing up. That was my family’s joke, that I’m adopted. So much so, because I look like nobody in my family, I got a DNA test. And I’m not adopted. I can show you if you want.”

Madison scrolls through her phone and finds some family photographs: it’s true, they all have bright red hair, an extreme contrast to her raven-black tresses, wide mouth and intense, dark eyes. “My brother and I are really close, but mentally, it’s such different parts of the brain that we use.”

Growing up, Madison’s thing – like her mother and grandmother before her – was horse riding. She started being home-schooled to ride more, spending most of her days at the barn looking after her horse. In the evenings, she would watch films, often with her dad, who liked Marilyn Monroe, Tarantino, Bond movies, all sorts. Madison particularly recalls watching Stand By Me when she was 11, and Jennifer Lawrence in The Hunger Games a while after. Aged 14, she decided that she wanted to give acting a shot.

Her break came a couple of years later in 2016 when she was cast in Better Things, a new sitcom from Pamela Adlon and Louis CK. The show, about a working single mum (Adlon) and her three, volatile daughters (Madison’s character, Max, is the eldest), ran for five seasons. “That show was my film school, my college, and I learned a lot about acting too, certainly,” she says.

Even better, though, was being cast as Sadie, an acolyte of Charles Manson, in Tarantino’s 2019 Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. When the director’s previous film had been released – The Hateful Eight in 2015 – Madison had travelled to New York with her father to watch it. She kept the ticket stub in her wallet for years and, without realising it, even had it in there when she was auditioning for Tarantino.

“It was a dream come true,” says Madison of working with Tarantino. “Literally, he is my hero. I remember watching The Hateful Eight with my dad, and I was getting more serious about acting, and we were like, ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing to do a movie like this? Ha ha, yeah!’ And then for it to be my first big movie role, that was completely unbelievable and the greatest entry into film for me. But it was also, ‘OK, well, fuck, I just worked with my hero at 19. What am I going to do now?’”

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Anora is already thrusting Madison into the orbit of a few of her fantasy collaborators: she maintains a Google Doc wishlist of actors and film-makers she wants to work with. She was especially pleased that Gerwig was the head of the jury at Cannes. “That made me really happy,” says Madison, “because I admired her for a long time, especially when I was starting out. Her work spurred me, made me want to become an actress, she was definitely a part of that. So it was really, really cool for her to be the head of the jury and to watch my movie. I was like, ‘She knows who I am now!’”

Madison insists that her life hasn’t changed much since Cannes. She’s not signed on to any new projects yet, though she has met “some really wonderful, interesting people”.

There may be awards talk around Madison, but she’s not ready to go there yet. “The film hasn’t even come out,” she says. “But I always felt that we were making something special. I always knew, no matter what, it would be at least one person’s favourite movie.”

Whatever Madison does next, she is striving to find the same intensity of immersion that she had on Anora. She knows it won’t be possible with every project. “At the end of the day, you can’t really shove 10lbs of flour into a 5lb sack,” she says. “But as an actress, it has given me a discipline. And I feel very confident now in my voice: that I have things to share and I have ideas that people should want to hear.”

• Anora is released in UK and Irish cinemas on 1 November