Sean Baker, the filmmaker behind Tangerine and The Florida Project, pitched Madison the idea of writing a movie for her after he had been knocked out by the one-two punch of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (she plays a Manson acolyte who dies via Leonardo DiCaprio’s flamethrower) and the fifth instalment of the Scream franchise (her Ghostface killer also comes to a fatal end when her face meets a gas hob and bursts into flames.) Like those burning embers that she often encounters, she possesses an elemental tenacity. Watch a Mikey Madison film and you’ll come away feeling a few degrees hotter.
The truth is, Madison is usually scared – really scared, actually. When she was on Quentin Tarantino’s set at the age of 19, she had to run full-force towards the camera with a knife in hand. “I remember my face got hot,” she says. “Do you know that feeling, like hot and tingly? And I could feel my heartbeat here,” she places a hand on her chest, recalling the elevated BPM. “But then I was like, ‘No, the character needs this. She has to run towards this person with all of her energy and let some crazy sound out. This is who she is in that moment.’ And so I just forced myself to do it.”
Growing up, Madison suffered from the kind of debilitating shyness that only throwing yourself in the deep end through acting could cure, precisely because she didn’t feel like herself. At school, she would feel ill – “like, physically nauseous” – before class kicked off every morning. “I think socially, I really struggled in that environment,” she says. “And then in terms of education, the way that the schools were teaching wasn’t the way that I learned.” If Madison struggled to connect with kids her age, she found solace in animals. (Hence the pets.)
You could call Madison a horse girl. For a long time in her childhood, she believed she would become an equestrian – she was so dedicated that she switched to homeschooling to spend more hours (all of her hours, really) at the stables. Getting off the horse was a particularly tough sacrifice to make once acting began to take over. “I knew that, if I wanted to be an actress, I needed to focus completely on that,” Madison says. “I didn’t think that I could do both.” Even back then, she knew that commitment meant living and breathing it. “If I do something, it needs to be with all of myself, all of my time.” These days, she’s considering a homecoming. She refreshes an adoption site for miniature ponies daily, imagining a future on a ranch with her prized stallions.
Anora, the stripper screwball comedy that has become the critical darling of the year, instilled a different kind of fear in Madison. “There were definitely doubts towards myself of, like, ‘Can I pull this off?’” she says. “‘Am I going to be able to do the amount of work that’s necessary to play this kind of character?’” Madison plays Anora (Ani to her friends), an exotic dancer from New York who falls for a Russian oligarch’s son. He whisks her off to his Brighton Beach mansion, then to Vegas where they rush off for a shotgun wedding. When his family back home tries to annul the marriage, they’re unaware of who they’re up against: the force of nature that is Anora.
Madison threw herself into preparation, but didn’t anticipate the sheer magnitude of what she had to take on. “I remember my first Russian session, I was like, ‘Fuck, there’s no way I’m going to be able to learn Russian for this movie,’” she recalls. “Like, ‘This is impossible. I can’t believe I didn’t start this six months ago.’” The pole-dancing skills came together after one failed session, a whole lot of procrastination and a renewed dedication through multiple classes a week and a pole her father installed in her home. Two months before the rest of the crew, she arrived in Brighton Beach to familiarise herself with the neighbourhood. And she showed Baker Ani’s voice – a thick Brooklyn accent, worlds apart from Madison’s sophisticated variation of the Valley dialect – on the first day of shooting.
“I worked on the emotionality of [Ani], the physicality, every possible part of her. But I was very aware that it was on my back” – Mikey Madison
If Baker set the foundations for Ani in the script, it was Madison who placed every brick and tile. A few days before production began, she came to the realisation that she had no reason to be nervous. “I’ve done all the work, I know this character,” she says. “I’ve worked on the emotionality of it, the physicality, every possible part of her. But I was very aware that it was on my back.”
For months, she had focused so single-mindedly on creating Ani that on set she wasn’t sure if her work was being seen. A week of shooting went by without a word of feedback. Then producer (and Baker’s wife) Samantha Quan pulled her aside. “I just want you to know this is a dream for us, we love this collaboration,” she told her. “I was like, ‘Oh, thank God,’” Madison remembers. She and Baker were so in tune with each other that some things could be left unspoken.
Connecting with a director on such a level was new territory. There have been projects where Madison and her collaborators “weren’t on the same page creatively”. She would walk on to set, overflowing with ideas, only to be met with a director so married to their own vision they wouldn’t accept what she had to offer. “It’s disheartening as an actor, because I’m not a puppet,” she says. “I’m the one who’s embodying this person and being told exactly what to do doesn’t feel creative.” In Baker, she found a filmmaker who not only respects her but works in the same way she does: “This experience has completely changed the way that I want to work in the future.”
The sadness of saying goodbye to Ani settled in on the last day. Madison mourned the friendships she had made – the kind marked by the instantaneous closeness that can only be forged through the tiring, all-consuming nature of a film production – but she also recognised that this wasn’t an experience that comes around often. Actually, it may just be one of a kind. “It sounds cheesy to say,” she says, “but it was genuinely life-changing.”
But Anora never really leaves you. Having been in the room myself, I can attest that the premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, where the film won the Palme d’Or, had a singular energy that doesn’t ignite often. Maybe it was the Take That needle-drop in the first scene that locked 2,300 journalists, filmmakers and arthouse buffs into the film’s wavelength. Or maybe it happened during the staggering central sequence, in which Ani’s cataclysmic fury destroys priceless ornaments and a pair of fixers. The standing ovation was seven-and-a-half minutes long, but the audience burst into rapturous applause mid-film no less than three times. By the end, my hands were stinging.
The crowd-pleasing joys of Anora have kept Madison, 25, firmly on Oscar prognosticators’ best actress lists since May – but she hasn’t looked that far ahead. When we speak, Anora has just had its opening weekend, achieving the best per-screen average of the year. “I haven’t thought about the next six months,” she says. “That just feels like such a long time. I don’t even really know what I’m doing next week! I’m just trying to take things slowly.”
Fundamentally, life hasn’t radically transformed for Madison yet. She has laundry to do today, and an overdramatic pup to worry about. These are Before Times. But Madison has noticed a barely perceptible shift. “The way that other people treat me has been feeling different, which is strange.”
In what way?
“I just… I just noticed a change.” She doesn’t quite have the vocabulary yet to recognise what this encroaching fame feels like.
“If I do something, it needs to be with all of myself, all of my time”
It’s in Madison’s nature to be this thoughtful and feeling. She grew up in California’s San Fernando Valley with her two older half-sisters, two brothers (one her twin, the other younger) and her psychologist parents. “I think that I inherited my dad’s depth of emotion and his nostalgia, and my mother’s vulnerability and thoughtfulness,” she says. “Both of my parents are very emotional people.” Madison can empathise. She says her own sensitivity was “very tortuous for me and really difficult to deal with, but I’ve learned to appreciate it in myself and also in my parents.”
Her family moved around the area before planting roots in the house that her parents still live in today. Her childhood bedroom is near-perfectly preserved, populated with the clothes she’s grown out of, the same sheets on her bed and the vintage furniture she picked up on thrift-store trips with her mother. The centrepiece was a blue-chipped secretary desk passed down from her great-grandmother, which now lives in Madison’s own home in LA.
As if the dust from her antiques made its way into her bloodstream, Madison has always been something of an older soul. Technology is, by her own admission, not one of her strengths. (Her Zoom malfunctions twice over the course of our call.) As for social media, the closest she’s ever been to Instagram is through the daily screen recordings of animal videos that Baker texts her. “I don’t even allow myself a lurk,” she shares. She’s so avoidant of technology, in fact, that she has no idea how AI works. (Specifically: “What the fuck is ChatGPT?”) And perhaps because Madison is blissfully unaware that university students are using AI to cheat on their essays, and Hollywood is using AI to cheat on cinema, she’s still hopeful that the invasive, soul-sucking tech that’s infecting our everyday lives will only reinforce our humanity. “Don’t you think maybe that would make people want to do the complete opposite, and make movies the way they’re supposed to be made? Don’t you think that would create some kind of switch?”
What Madison’s own future looks like is still hazy. As of writing, she has yet to sign up to anything else. No blockbusters, no TV shows, no buzzy projects with auteurs. Many actors in her situation would capitalise on the momentum from starring in a Palme d’Or winner (and, what the hell, probably a future Oscar winner too) and set the next few years in motion. But Madison is more careful. “I think that I’m being very thoughtful about the next job I choose for many different reasons,” she explains. “I know who I am as an actor and an artist now. I know how I want to feel making a movie. I’ve been lucky to have every job that I’ve had, but I want to feel – even just a little bit – the way I felt making Sean’s movie on my next. So it’s important for me to be in love with the character. It’s an emotional job that I’m doing, and so I’m waiting for something that really speaks to me. That’s what I’ve been thinking about, and right now I’m still waiting for that.”
Madison practises manifestation. During one day of clearing out and reminiscing, she flicked through an old journal and picked out a note she had scrawled when she was 17. In it, she had written that she hoped to work with Quentin Tarantino. Nowadays, she keeps a running Google Doc of dream directors and co-stars, the contents of which she declines to share. She would rather let fate’s hand work its magic.
What can be said for certain, though, is that Madison will commit. By the end of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, her character has been disfigured by a sharp can of dog food, mauled by a pit bull, and thrown through a glass door. When it was time for her to be set ablaze, Madison joined Tarantino behind the monitor to watch her blood-soaked stunt double disappear in a fireball. In hindsight, it was the right call to leave it to the professionals – but for a moment, she thought differently. Going all in is Mikey Madison’s default. “Honestly, if they had asked me to do it, I probably would have said yes.”
Hair RENA CALHOUN at A-FRAME using ORIBE, make-up MELISSA HERNANDEZ at THE WALL GROUP using DIOR BEAUTY, nails YOSHIKO YAMAGUCHI, photographic assistant PAIGE LABUDA, lighting NATHANIEL JEROME, styling assistants TONYA HUYNH, COLIN NGUYEN, KAMERON KUBICKI, digital operator NICK RAPAZ, production FARAGO PROJECTS, production coordinator REILLY HAIL
