How Mikey Madison got 'almost too comfortable' in strip clubs

TORONTO

Mikey Madison had no idea what to expect as she worked the floor of a strip club on the set of “Anora,” deep in character as a young sex worker from Brooklyn, approaching men to see who might want to buy a lap dance.

The introverted 25-year-old actress had never been the lead in, well, anything. And now here she was, as the charismatic, and often naked, center of the completely improvised opening sequence of Sean Baker’s sexy, hilarious and ultimately heartbreaking romp of a capitalist love story — and giving a captivating performance that pundits seem to agree will earn her an Oscars nod.

“Anora” won this year’s Palme d’Or, with Cannes jury president Greta Gerwig calling it an “incredible human and humane film that captured our hearts, let us laugh, let us hope beyond hope, broke our hearts and never lost sight of the truth.” Madison is in nearly every frame as the title character, Ani (short for Anora), who gets swept up in a whirlwind, only-semi-transactional romance with Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn, who’s 22), the hard-partying son of a Russian oligarch. Soon, he’s asked her to be his hired girlfriend for a week, and then his wife in a quickie Vegas green-card wedding. Ani finds herself living out a bacchanalian fantasy filled with sprayed champagne, lines of coke, and comically brief and vigorous sex — until his parents send in a team of goons to force an annulment.

“I’d never done a sex scene. And Mark is like: ‘Okay, Mikey, maybe I will do backflip onto bed. I pull off my pants, and my penis will go bloop!’” says Madison, laughing as she imitates Eydelshteyn’s Russian accent.

It’s a little like “Pretty Woman,” by way of a slapstick version of David Cronenberg’s Russian mob thriller “Eastern Promises.”

But back to the lap dances. As with his other films celebrating American sex workers, such as “The Florida Project” and “Red Rocket,” Baker, who wrote and directed “Anora,” wanted the high-stakes Russian roulette of Ani’s work life to mimic reality. So, he had filled a real gentleman’s club, Rosewood Theater in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards, with actual club dancers, plus stringently vetted male background actors who were instructed to act like real customers. It was up to Madison, then, to weave through the room and shoot her shot. “Hi, I’m Ani,” she would start, before launching into a sweetly persuasive sales pitch, in a thick Brighton Beach accent she had spent a year perfecting, while competing with other naked “girls” all hoping to land clients.

“I had no idea where a scene was going to take me. I’m kind of just picking up a guy, or giving a lap dance from start to finish and seeing, like, what I could get,” Madison tells me, sitting primly on a couch in a cavernous event space the day after the movie’s lavish North American premiere at last month’s Toronto Film Festival.

Eventually, she says, laughing, she got “almost too comfortable” walking naked around the club, or twerking in just a thong, or languidly undulating her hips against a guest while topless and blowing bubbles with a wad of gum — one of many tiny character choices for Ani that Madison devised.

For Luna Miranda, a 25-year-old actress and stripper from Brooklyn who plays Ani’s best friend, Madison was clearly paying attention in the year of research she did before shooting the film. “She does this laugh when something a client says is really weird, like this one guy who’s like, ‘You look like my daughter.’ Like, I know that little laugh.”

What stuck out to her even more was how energetic and bubbly Madison was as Ani. “You can really feel how hard she’s trying to get these clients,” Miranda says. “And then there’s the scene of her on the train on her way home, and she’s … drained and exhausted. And I’m like, ‘That is so real.’”

It can be jarring to see Madison tear through the screen — as well as through three grown men in a quite funny and very violent 28-minute real-time home-invasion scene — and then do a Q&A without a trace of Ani’s accent or attitude. The polar opposite of the wild, always hustling extrovert she plays, Madison is so soft-spoken and allergic to hyping herself that one worries that she’ll get steamrolled by her more outgoing competition on the Oscar campaign trail.

“She’s [a] very, very quiet, sweet person. Very, very proper. Very different from what you see on the screen,” says Karren Karagulian, who plays an Armenian priest who is also the head henchman of Ivan’s family’s cleanup crew. “Sometimes I would just go and hug her, and thank her for being so good at [a] scene.”

The first time Eydelshteyn met Madison, he had just flown in from Moscow and didn’t have a great handle on English. “It was really awkward. We talked about the weather, then we talked about Brighton Beach, then we talked about movies and then silence,” he says. They knew they would be getting naked together incredibly soon, so Madison suggested they go see the horror film “Infinity Pool.” Afterward, he says, they were able to talk about the movie they had just seen, “and I realized that she’s so smart and very deep and really into cinematography.”

The next time he saw her was on their first day of the shoot “and I just said, ‘Is something wrong with Mikey?’” She seemed so different, so not like the person he had met just a few days before. “It was crazy because it’s like [she was] another person with another energy and another form of speech.”

On her Toronto press day, she’s all business, in a tasteful gray pinstriped Schiaparelli minidress with bold golden buttons and burgundy patent-leather stilettos. She also seems infinitely more comfortable talking about Ani’s feelings than her own — that is until her redheaded twin brother, Miles, who works in real estate, walks by, and she bursts out laughing. (Everyone in her family, including her four other siblings, is a redhead except for her.)

“He just gave me a twin signal,” she says, immediately softening. “It was the twin telepathy.”

That almost musical voice of hers is a product of growing up in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley, adjacent to the Kardashians’ Calabasas money. As a kid, she spent more time with horses than with people. “I was sitting on a pony before I could walk,” she says. Madison, who is Jewish and whose given name is Mikaela Madison Rosberg, was home-schooled so she could spend more time at a barn in the L.A. suburbs. Her whole life revolved around competitive horseback riding until, at 14, she decided she was “craving some kind of deeper connection with people” and started pursuing acting instead.

“I remember [my mom] was just like, ‘How is my shy daughter, who can’t even look people in the eye, going to be able to do this?’” Madison says, laughing.

No one in her family was an actor. “It was just me trying to jump into this somehow,” she says. Her parents are both psychologists, and her youngest brother wants to follow in their footsteps. She also has two older sisters, one of whom works as a “hairstylist slash private investigator.” (Note to Madison: Write a movie about her.)

Once she set her mind to it, making it as an actor became her total focus. She took an online young-adult acting class and eventually landed an audition, at 16, to play Pamela Adlon’s spoiled teenage daughter on the FX series “Better Things,” on which she says she is grateful to have grown up over the course of five seasons.

She owes a lot, she thinks, to Quentin Tarantino, who gave her her first movie role, at 19, alongside the then-unknown Austin Butler, Margaret Qualley, Maya Hawke and Sydney Sweeney, in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” a movie that has recently become a social media obsession for launching the careers so many rising stars. She plays a murderous Manson Family member whom Leonardo DiCaprio torches with a flamethrower as she unleashes bloodcurdling screams in a pool. After that, she says, directors seemed to see her in a different light. “More doors were kind of creaking open for me after that.”

She stops mid-thought. “Don’t hate me. I’ve got to take my shoe off,” she says, bending down and removing just one of her heels. She knows it looks ridiculous, but, really, only one foot hurts, and why mess with the other? “I really should have done this earlier. What was I saying?”

Baker had been working on a script about a young Brighton Beach sex worker with a lot of humor and attitude — “a scrapper,” as he describes her — when he and his wife and producing partner, Samantha Quan, decided to see “Scream V” on opening weekend in 2022.

Madison had shot the latest iteration of the horror franchise over the pandemic, when she was depressed and out of work. “They were like, ‘Let’s go have fun in North Carolina!’ And I was like … ‘This sounds amazing!’” she says.

Sitting in the theater, Baker recognized Madison from her insane death scene in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” and seeing her morph from a sweet girl into the psychopathic killer Ghostface in “Scream” had him convinced. He turned to Quan, he recalls, “and I said, ‘We’re calling Mikey’s agent the minute we leave the theater.’”

Baker had been looking for someone with chops and a unique physicality who felt like a discovery. He loved Madison’s porcelain skin and huge, mesmerizing eyes, and the range and intensity she had displayed in both roles. “Obviously, she’s playing crazy in both of them, so I knew she could scream, right? But it wasn’t just that,” he says. “I remember asking myself: ‘Why hasn’t she been tapped for a lead role yet? Am I going to be the one who does it? Cool! Let’s do this!’”

When Baker asked to meet for coffee to pitch her the movie, Madison said “yes” on the spot, without seeing a page of the script.

“I remember going home and having to call my agent and being in disbelief that it was that easy,” she says. “I was like, ‘Hey, can we just triple-, quadruple-check that I actually have the role?’”

For a year, while shooting a small part in the Natalie Portman miniseries “Lady in the Lake,” Madison thought of Ani every day. She read biographies and memoirs of sex workers, watched their day-in-the-life-of videos and started working with a dialect coach to nail that Brighton Beach accent. When Baker asked if she would do dance training, it turned out she had already started months before.

She installed a pole in her living room so she could practice multiple times a day (“physically, the most difficult thing I’ve ever done”), learned how to twerk (“which was a very unforgettable hour and a half”) and shadowed dancers in clubs as often as possible. While there, she would watch how they talked to customers and noticed how the relationships among dancers mimicked co-workers in any other place of employment.

“You’re hustling every night to make as much money as you can,” she says. “So it can be competitive at times, but you can also have a lot of camaraderie.” (A moment in the film when Ani eats salad out of a Tupperware container was something she picked up from seeing how girls in clubs often brought in their own food for meal breaks.)

A month before shooting started, she moved to Brighton Beach, choosing to live in an apartment right next to the elevated subway, just as Ani does in the film, so close that she could feel vibrations when trains passed. She was born in Los Angeles, so she wanted to get the feel of a life where you walk to get your groceries and have to bundle up just to step outside. Plus, she hoped to get to know the people Ani would have grown up around. “It’s such an interesting community and one that I don’t know if I ever would have experienced if I hadn’t done this film, because how often do you get to live in Brighton Beach for a couple months?”

Every day, she would go out into the Brooklyn neighborhood and test out the accent to see if people were buying it. She bought revealing outfits that she thought Ani might like and had the film’s hairdresser put tinsel in her hair. And she figured that Ani would probably vape and chew gum all the time, as most strippers do, to keep their breath fresh since they’re right up in people’s faces so often.

Oh, and she learned enough Russian that she could be passably conversational with an American accent, as Ani is in the film. After her first 2?-hour lesson, she says, “I just cried because I was like, ‘There’s no way I’m going to be able to do this movie.’” Then she picked herself up and started over again, listening to 10-hour recordings of Russians speaking, day and night, “just so I could absorb something in my head while I was sleeping.”

When Eydelshteyn and Yura Borisov, a movie star in Moscow (“Compartment No. 6”) who plays a heartthrob goon who is clearly in awe of Ani, showed up on set, she would ask them to do language drills with her, too. “It was very charming,” Eydelshteyn says. “Before every scene with Russian language, she rehearsed with me 400 times. And I [would say]: ‘Yes, it’s good. You’re speaking very well.’ And she said, ‘No, no, no, no, we have to do it better,’ when on the fifth time it was amazing, and it was still amazing on the 50th time.”

All of that preparation came to a head during the movie’s nearly half-hour home-invasion scene, when Ani single-handedly fights off Ivan’s family’s goons, who are trying to end her marriage and this once-in-a lifetime chance she has to change her circumstances. Baker hired stunt doubles but never used them. That’s really Madison punching Borisov straight in the face (with her co-star’s enthusiastic permission).

“I would go home bruised with a busted knee and just absolutely exhausted, but it was worth it,” Madison says. “I would jump out of bed the next morning, excited to go back. Because how often [will I] get to play a character like that, and do my own stunts?” In another fight scene, her acrylic nail and real nail ripped off simultaneously.

It’s the film’s emotional final scene, though, that makes her performance so unforgettable. “Mikey understood that Ani has to internalize a lot,” Baker says. “That’s just skill on Mikey’s part, giving little glimpses of what’s going on inside but never truly revealing it, and then allowing it to all come out at the end.”

At a screening for sex workers in L.A., girls raised their legs and applauded with their Pleaser platform heels.

Baker talks often about this movie in the context of a career dedicated to destigmatizing sex work. It’s something that Madison has become passionate about, too. “I’ve made so many incredible friends who are sex workers, and the thing that I want most is for them to feel protected and seen and acknowledged,” she says.

“And I remember after the Cannes screening, Luna came up to me crying, and she was like, ‘You represented us so well.’ She gave this beautiful, heartfelt seal of approval. And that was, like, everything to me.”