How Mikey Madison Charmed Hollywood

It's a particularly surreal day to be Mikey Madison. For a few months, she's been tunnel-visioned on one thing: the long, relentless awards campaign for Anora, Sean Baker’s drama about an exotic dancer whose too-good-to-be-true romance with the son of an oligarch is threatened when his family comes to town. Just when she had come to terms with this new reality—days filming Variety's iconic Actors on Actors video with Pamela Anderson, nights taking her father to awards parties and attending the Golden Globes—it all suddenly stopped. “Everything kind of came to a screeching halt because of what's happening in Los Angeles,” Madison says, referring to the harrowing wildfires that have been ravaging the area.

In west Hollywood in early January, the sky is clear and bright baby blue. There are still uncontained fires burning on both sides of the city, but—apart from the unusually empty lunch hour at the vegan bistro Crossroads Kitchen—if you didn’t know any better, you’d think it was just another day in LA. The Oscar nominations will be announced in a couple of days —and yes, Madison will pick one up for best actress, as was expected by anyone paying attention as soon as Anora opened way back in October—but the campaign is more or less on pause. Who could think about golden statues at a time like this? And yet here we are, talking about just that. Madison immediately acknowledges the inherent strangeness of the contrast: “It's so weird to be where we are right now, and it kind of feels like business as usual, and then just a handful of miles away, there's so much craziness happening,” she says. She’s been doing her part, donating to GoFundMes for people who lost everything and sending clothes to supply drives for the thousands of people who lost everything to the fires: “I just want to help more.”

Jacket by Gucci. Jewelry by Tiffany & Co.

Despite having been named as a frontrunner for best actress as early as Anora’s Cannes premiere last May, Madison’s unique position in this race should not be understated. At 25, she would be the youngest recipient of the award since Jennifer Lawrence in 2013. She is certainly the only person to migrate from Scream villain to Oscar nominee within the space of three years. But Madison has been on the grind since her teens. “Lots of people have no idea who I am,” she tells me. She has barely been able to process her own sudden rise, which she feels will make more sense in the rearview. “A lot of it feels surreal,” she says. “But I think I'm so much just in my own world that I'm taking it in at a slower pace, and then I'll have a realization later of like, ‘Wow, I actually did that.’”

After spending six years on dramedy Better Things as creator and star Pamela Adlon’s daughter, she’s built a career in film on the back of attention-grabbing appearances like her live-wire take on Manson girl Sadie in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. As a young cinephile, Madison was already a Tarantino superfan. “Seeing his films genuinely changed my life,” she says of the director. She connected with him instantly during her audition for the 2019 film, where she showed up in a colorful vintage ’60s dress and a fur coat, barefoot and clutching a painting she’d made for him as a gift. It was Madison’s performance in Once Upon a Time… and her wild heel turn in 2022’s Scream (no spoilers) that caught Baker’s attention.

Dress by Louis Vuitton. Bracelet by Tiffany & Co.

Baker, who calls Madison “the whole package,” recalls how Mikey’s acid-soaked performance as Sadie (based on real-life Manson family member Susan Atkins) knocked him flat on his back. “She comes out of nowhere in the last 15 minutes of the film,” he says. “And I'm like, ‘Oh my God, who is that?’ She has such an impactful persona and performance in that film. I saw it again because I really liked the film, and then I went back a third time simply to watch her scenes.” He kept her filed in his mind for a future project. “There was something unique about her. I think that she had something different from what you would see Hollywood normally producing.”

Baker was reminded again of Madison a few years later when he saw her “subtly funny” part in Scream (2022). By then, he was conceptualizing a movie about a stripper named Anora—an enigmatic and charming Brooklynite—and looking for the perfect actress to play the lead. “And there she was,” Baker says, “right on the screen.” He didn’t audition anyone else for the role. He called Madison’s agent and a year later they were shooting Anora together in New York.

Madison’s parents are both psychologists. She brought her father to one film event, where she says he diagnosed the characters in various movies (although he hasn’t shared where exactly in the DSM he’d place Anora). His passions include woodworking and photography, and Madison calls him “an artist trapped in a psychologist’s body”. He made a lot of the family’s furniture.

While her folks take a clinical approach to emotions, Madison’s is generally more visceral. “I think a lot of the way that I work is quite intuitive,” she says. “Sometimes I'll sort of be breaking things down and really dissecting a character and their psychology, why they do things, and sometimes I just feel it.”

Madison is nothing like Anora, aside from a shared fondness for long, manicured nails. “I think people expect something, and then when they get me, I wonder if people are disappointed,” she says. “But I can't be anyone other than myself, right?” She’s drawn to playing extreme characters precisely because it allows her to explore. “If I play these characters, then I'm going to get to experience so much life and living through them. And it doesn't have to be me, you know? I get to have a safety net.”

There’s an intensity to her work that couldn’t be more different from her calm, peaceful energy in real life. Sean Baker remembers his surprise at meeting the shy, soft-spoken Madison after seeing her passionate performances. “She's a listener more than a talker,” he says. But that power you see onscreen in her acting roles is clearly lurking somewhere just under the surface.

Shirt, vintage. Shorts by Hermes. Shoes by Mephisto. Necklace by Tiffany & Co.

To prepare Madison for her role in Anora, Baker bought her a Blu-ray player and started sending her movies to watch, like Maurice Pialat’s Loulou—particularly for the lead performance by Isabelle Huppert—and À Nos Amours. He also sent over a bunch of sexploitation movies, including the 1972 Japanese women’s-prison revenge drama Female Prisoner Number #701: Scorpion, which Madison says she didn’t quite understand the purpose of at first, other than that Baker just really loves the genre. “But then there would be something that would click, and I'd be like, ‘Oh! He wants me to see this, or collect the energy from this character,’” she tells me. Baker says he wanted her to watch Scorpion for the scene where Anora leaves her rich beau’s mansion in her fur coat. Madison says sharing these highly specific tonal recommendations with Baker helped her understand the type of vividly colorful, high-impact but unpretentious movie he wanted them to make together.

Madison had never done screen nudity before Anora, but she didn’t feel nervous about it, particularly because of how goofy a lot of it is. “I found in the script that there was a lot of, like, humor and silliness involved in some of the sex scenes,” she says. (In one early scene, Madison’s co-star Mark Eydelshteyn cuts through the tension by doing a naked roly-poly). She found that Anora’s sexual content, rather than merely being titillating, was more about disarming the audience and humanizing sex work. While preparing for the role, Madison met with sex workers, including consultant Andrea Werhun, and worked with a dance instructor who taught her the fundamentals of pole- and lap-dancing. She also set out on an odyssey through LA strip clubs to meet and shadow exotic dancers. “Now I have a lot of wonderful friends that are a part of that community,” she says. “It was important to me to try to research as much as possible. I wanted to try to understand that community in a really specific way, so that I could portray Ani’s life as realistically as possible. I didn't want it to be sensationalized or dramatized in a negative way. I just wanted it to be what it was.”

With friends in tow, she trawled Sunset Boulevard strip clubs like The Body Shop and The Seventh Veil. “I was like, ‘I need to go to clubs and see how the girls move. I want to understand how you walk onto a stage, and how you collect money and how you talk to people,’” she says. She was particularly nervous about working the pole, because she has vertigo—“I have horrible equilibrium”—but her determination to “learn to go upside down” was greater than her worry about being thrown off-balance. All that training, she says, gave her a tremendous respect for how exotic dancers are able to do something so physically grueling and make it look seamless and effortless.

“Something I observed about sex workers is how emotional of a job it is, which is something at first I didn't quite realize,” Madison says. “Because obviously you're doing all this physical work of dancing and giving lap dances and being on your feet all night. But it's very emotional… To exchange those energies all night, or receive very sexual energy at you, or something dark or sad or happy. It's all of it, all at once. You kind of get to the nitty gritty of someone very quickly.”

Tank top, vintage. Skirt by Gucci. Necklace by Tiffany & Co.

A few months ago, production company Neon held screenings of Anora for audiences of exotic dancers in Los Angeles and New York. “The response that we got from those women was overwhelmingly positive and beautiful,” says Madison. After the screening, many of the women approached her to say they felt seen; Madison calls it “the best critics’ review that I could have ever gotten.” While she knows the movie couldn’t portray the full range of their experiences, she hopes that in showing one specific character’s story, she’s helped depict sex workers in an honest, uplifting way.

Madison finds the endless promo run quite emotionally draining, but moments like that help. As a self-described introvert, she’s not accustomed to talking about herself so much, and doesn’t find herself especially interesting. She’s not online and likes to spend her time off “in her own little world”. For Baker, watching Madison bloom professionally throughout the process of making and promoting Anora has been deeply gratifying. “It's been incredible,” he says. “And it proves that this is where she belongs. She knows how to work that red carpet. She knows how to work any press junkets.”

Shoes, vintage by Osaga. Bracelet by Tiffany & Co.

But getting good at promoting herself is really just a means to an end for Madison—the goal being landing more acting work she can really sink her teeth into. As Baker puts it, “She's doing this so she can maintain a very, for lack of a better word, high-brow career. Moving forwards, she's going to be very picky with the films that she chooses.” He reminds me that she came into films at the highest possible level, working with Tarantino right off the bat. “She wants to do quality work. She doesn't want to do the same thing again and again. She doesn't want to play another sex worker right away, or another psychopath. She wants to mix it up.” Madison seconds this, and says she’s taking her time picking her next projects. “It's an emotional job, and so for me, I approach it in an emotional way,” she tells me. “I'm taking my time, which I'm grateful that I have the luxury of being able to do right now.” She doesn’t want to jinx anything in the works by talking about it, but it’s clear that there are great things coming. “I'm really, really excited for the future,” Madison says, “which is nice for me.”

Suit by Tiger of Sweden. Scarf by Tom Ford. Jewelry by Tiffany & Co.

This story originally appeared in British GQ.

PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Morgan Maher
Styled by Karolyn Pho
Production by Annee Elliot
Prop stylist, Jame Rene
Hair by Rena Calhoun
Makeup by Melissa Hernandez
Manicure by Yoko Sakakura