The Tasmanian devil who screamed, thrashed and hellcatted her way through “Anora” as Ani, a sex worker caught up in a terrifying but also funny adventure of Russian billionaires and Armenian thugs, did not show up to talk to TheWrap at a recent interview. Instead, Mikey Madison — soft-spoken, thoughtful and understated — came to talk about her process. It was a surprise given her attention-grabbing performance, in which she struts around a strip club soliciting customers for lap dances and, after a series of madcap twists, ends up throwing a man twice her size across the room in a scene that culminates in a close-up of her in repeated, earthshaking screams.
That character does not seem anything like the diminutive 25-year-old actress who came to chat in early January.
“The way that I go about my work is I have to completely love this character,” Madison said, smiling when it’s mentioned just how different she is from Ani. “I love her. Everything that comes out of her mouth, I wholeheartedly believe is the truth. The most important thing is I have to completely empathize with this character. My mindset was to love her and understand her so that I could embody her.”
That embodiment earned Madison Oscar, SAG, Golden Globe and Critics Choice nominations, along with more than a dozen critics’ awards and an array of raves like this, from the New Yorker’s Justin Chang: “Madison plays her with a bawdy effrontery and a disarming grin that seems to widen by a mile under neon lights.”
And Madison herself raves about Ani, too. “She is very forthright. She stands her ground,” she said. “She believes in her place in the world. She doesn’t question that part of herself. I always admired that about her. I think that she has a hopefulness, but mostly a fight — emotionally, physically. And I admire that about her. That’s not a quality that I feel that I have. I mean, I think that I fight for myself in some ways, but I’m much more passive than she is. I tend to accept lots of things that happen, and she’s like, ‘No, I won’t accept this. This isn’t right, and I’m going to fight for what I believe is rightfully mine, or the life that I deserve.’ And that’s the quality that I love.”
It’s not exactly true that Madison doesn’t fight for what she wants. There was nothing passive, for instance, about how she set out to create Ani from the ground up. She shadowed a sex worker for months, learning to pole dance and absorbing the culture of the clubs. She studied Russian. She trained intensively to adopt the hyper-particular Brooklyn accent of Brighton Beach. She also did all her own stunts, which left her bruised during the shoot. She so convincingly became Ani that since “Anora” came out, she finds people constantly telling her that she should really try acting, convinced that she’s a real Brooklynite pole dancer.
Madison laughed as she recounted this. “I think that’s just the way that I like to do things,” she said. “I don’t like to do anything halfway. It’s all or nothing for me. I don’t know if that’s healthy or not, it’s just the way that I have to do something.”
First Steps
Madison — born Mikaela Madison Rosberg — grew up in Southern California’s San Fernando Valley, the child of two psychologist parents, with a bunch of siblings, including a twin brother. Acting was nowhere on the family’s radar, or in its background. In her early adolescence, Madison was so devoted to competitive horseback riding that she asked her parents to homeschool her so she could spend more time at the barn and focus on riding. Her life was in Santa Clarita and Woodland Hills; Hollywood and its celebrity world was very far away.
“Whenever I tell people that I’m a native Angeleno, they’re like, ‘Oh, so you must have been around all of this,’” she said. “And it’s like, ‘No, I grew up in such a different Los Angeles. I didn’t grow up in Hollywood. I grew up in the Valley.”
But she also became aware of cinema, with films like “Pretty in Pink” and “Winter’s Bone” making such deep impressions that she decided to pursue acting. “I was really curious about filmmaking and acting and what that would be like,” she said. “What it would feel like to be someone else and throw yourself into a character.”
In a life that had been so devoted to horses, and one in which her parents had sacrificed to let her pursue that dream, the decision was huge. “I remember the day I decided I wanted to stop and try to transition to acting,” she said. “I told my mom, and it was so heartbreaking for me because I felt like I was ending a part of my life to start a new one. But it felt so necessary that I give all of myself to learning about acting and filmmaking.”
The honest truth of being a sex worker is that your body is your work and your skin is your costume.
Mikey Madison
And she did around age 15, committing to that pursuit with single-minded passion and finding early success. She played Max Fox, the daughter of the character played by Pamela Adlon in Adlon’s FX show “Better Things” from 2016 to 2022. She had a small but notable role in 2020 in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood,” playing Susan “Sadie” Atkins, part of Charles Manson’s murderous gang that descends on Roman Polanski’s house. (Her death at the hands of Leonardo DiCaprio’s flamethrower is one of the film’s signature moments.)
But “Anora” writer-director Sean Baker’s interest in Madison was piqued by a role in the fifth installment of “Scream,” a 2022 film in which she (spoiler!) ends up killing David Arquette’s sheriff character. She also demonstrated a very convincing… shriek.
“I had just made the decision to start looking for (the actress to play) Anora when we went to ‘Scream,’” said Baker, who saw the tongue-in-cheek slasher flick with his wife and “Anora” producer, Samantha Quan. “We were in the theater watching — I’d already seen her in ‘Once Upon a Time’ — and I was like, ‘She’s her. There’s no reason to look any further. We don’t need a casting call. No auditions.’”
Creating Ani
Baker reached out, and he and Quan met Madison for coffee in West Hollywood. “We were taken aback,” Baker said. “She’s not like those characters. She’s very reserved. Very soft-spoken. But that impressed me more — that she wasn’t typecast, and I’m not having to direct a crazy person.” By the end of the coffee, he’d offered her the role.
Baker had been working on the concept of “Anora” for years, starting with his desire to work with his longtime friend and sometime actor Karren Karagulian and center a story on the Russian community in Brighton Beach. Baker has also long been interested in the margins of society and in sex work, which he explored in work including his 2015 film “Tangerine,” in which Karagulian appears.
But once he met Madison, he tailored the screenplay with her in mind. Its lead character, Ani, is a business-savvy, no-nonsense pole and lap dancer at a club in the heart of Manhattan. When she captures the fancy of a spoiled young man named Ivan (played by Russian actor Mark Eydelshteyn), the son of an oligarch, she moves into his mansion as his private “girlfriend,” and they get married on a whim (as one does) in Las Vegas. When Ivan’s parents find out, all hell breaks loose.
The Fight
A wild fight scene ensues in Ivan’s sprawling home after heavies sent by Ivan’s parents show up to end the marriage and Ani fiercely stands her ground. The half-hour sequence manages to be hilarious, frightening and emotionally violent at the same time. At the center of it is Ani, who is pinned down, tied up with a telephone cord and gagged with a silk scarf by Igor, a silent, scary enforcer played by Russian actor Yura Borisov. Ani’s fury scares the gangsters, who have never contended with the likes of her.
“Sean wanted to take the stereotype of how these gangster characters are perceived and flip it on its head — and just show that these are real people who have been hired to do this job,” Madison said. “They’re never beating her or fighting her. They’re just trying to contain her. And there’s no weapons used in this film.
“But that’s why Ani fights so hard in the beginning, because she doesn’t know what’s going to happen to her. She doesn’t know if they’re going to kill her (or) what they’re going to do. And then comes a certain point where she realizes, ‘Oh, now the fight has changed. It’s not a fight for my life, it’s a fight to save my marriage.’”
While the action was choreographed and rehearsed, Baker said he was surprised that his young actress wanted to do her own stunts. “The scene — the whole set piece — was supposed to be her holding her own against these guys, being a firecracker, being a Tasmanian devil,” he said. “She knew the assignment. It was wonderful to see it play out.”
And then came the scream. “It was quite alarming and stressing,” Baker said with a laugh. “That first take when she screams, it’s bloodcurdling. The crew on the other side of the mansion — they were getting props ready — were hearing this screaming. They were like, ‘I can’t hear this anymore.’ It was very disturbing to see gentle little Mikey screaming like that.”
Then comes the moment where she kicks an Armenian thug, Garnik (Vache Tovmasyan) in the stomach, knocking him across the room and onto a glass coffee table, which shatters and sprays shards everywhere. Baker was looking for a transitional moment while he rehearsed the scene, letting the actors improvise. “(As) we were rehearsing, (Tovmasyan) said, ‘You’re going to stay here. You heard my boss. You’re gonna stay here till he comes.’ Mikey and I looked at each other and simultaneously we said, ‘F— your boss.’
“We knew we were so connected at that moment.”
Sex Work
Then there’s the issue of playing a sex worker. Madison was fine with it. “I’d seen Sean’s previous work, and he’s really dedicated quite a bit of his career to destigmatizing sex work and has made numerous wonderful films with characters who are sex workers,” she said. “And so for me, I knew that the portrayal would be authentic. Ani is a sex worker. Nudity is just naturally a part of that and it’s a part of her work. I always approached it as, Well, this is her job. This is what she does. And she’s a professional. She’s good at her job, and I am, too.”
Before shooting began, Madison had many conversations with sex workers who served as consultants on the film. “I wanted it to be a realistic portrayal,” she said. “I didn’t want it to be glamorized. I didn’t want it to be sensationalized or dramatized in a negative way. I wanted it to just reflect what is honest. And the honest truth of being a sex worker is that your body is your work and your skin is your costume. Ani is comfortable with that and so was I.”
Emotional Razor Blades
The heart-wrenching final scene of “Anora,” where Ani’s tough exterior finally cracks and she allows herself a moment of closeness with Igor, took everything she had. The scene plays out inside a car amid falling snow, and it took three days to wrestle the light, the tech, the snow. But initially, the emotion would not come for her.
“We shot it towards the end of our New York shoot,” Madison said. “It was hard to get there in the sense of it being such a vulnerable scene and one that I put a lot of pressure on myself to deliver. She has been putting on a face of bravery and perseverance and trying to keep some of her dignity that has been stripped away from her during this experience. She goes through so much and finally has this moment with someone she feels relatively safe with, where she’s able to let some of that go.
“We filmed it a handful of times,” she added. “And, you know, it’s a one-shot — it was always going to be that. And so once the other moving parts — the snow and the windshield wipers and the camera movements and the street being not too busy and the sun being right — once all of those things were in place, we were able to be emotionally centered. I got out the emotional razor blades. That’s the thing: You have to cut yourself up on the inside.”
She was in the car with Borisov and Baker, and initially she felt lost. Finally, she pulled out her phone, found an encouraging voicemail her father had sent her years earlier and played it on speaker in the car. That message, she said, was “a light peeking through the darkness” as she struggled “to be honest and truthful to the emotions of what really would be happening to (Ani).”
That did it. The moment came. “It was very emotional, very vulnerable, frightening emotionally,” she said. “It was a lot of things, and it was a scene that I still thought about months after we were done filming. I just hope I got it right.”
This story first appeared in the Nominations Guide issue of TheWrap awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
