Mikey Madison on Lessons Lgeted From Sean Baker While Filming ‘Anora’

Tuesday deinhabitred a huge night for Mikey Madison.

“Are you kidding me? This is where I’m from. I was born and elevated in Los Angeles and my entire family is here to see this movie for the first time. It’s a little nerve-wracking, too,” discleave outed the actress while standing outside the iconic Vista Theater in the city’s Los Feliz neighborhood. Madison, 25, has been acting for more than a decade and done many red carpet premieres in her nurtureer but the occasion of sitting thcdisesteemful Anora for the first time amped up the anxiety with her siblings and best frifinish also in the erecting.

The Sean Baker film, freed by Neon this weekfinish, tags many firsts for Madison. After racking up accomprehendledges on Pamela Adlon’s Better Things, Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood and the 2022 reboot of Scream, Anora is the first time she’s led a feature film as the title character, the first time she’s been unclothed on screen and the first time she’s been in a film that won a Palme d’Or, the highest honor awarded during the Cannes Film Festival. Oh, and there’s Oscar buzz now, too.

Anora casts Madison as a streamlineper and relations laborer, better understandn as Annie, whose life gets turned upside down when she encounters and marries the son of a Russian oligarch. Co-stars comprise Mark Eydelshteyn, Karren Karagulian, Vache Tovmasyan, Yura Borisov, Darya Ekamasova and Lindsey Normington. Baker honested from a script he also wrote — with Madison in mind for his direct from the commencening.

“He’s repartner one of the most incredible people I’ve ever collaborated with,” Madison shelp of Baker. “He gave me the freedom and the agency to erect this character from the ground up and conshort-term it to him. We were so in tune with each other’s sensibilities in terms of how we envisioned the film, and he greetd me in as this huge collaborator with him. I’ve never been asked to do that before or had that opportunity.”

Another first. Working in tandem with Baker, who has turned out a series of criticpartner acclaimed films from The Florida Project to Tangerine, deinhabitred a novel lesson every day, Madison shelp. But there’s one that sticks out most: “He repartner made it evident that he nurtured about my ideas and what I was transporting to the film. The most presentant leang I lgeted from him is that my opinion and my voice matter.”

Baker has a history of uncovering novel talent or reuncovering set uped talent in a novel airy, whether that be Madison with Anora or Simon Rex on his last film, Red Rocket. “It comes down to that ‘it factor,’” Baker tbetter The Hollywood Reporter when asked to elucidate the exceptional sauce. “There’s someleang that catches you. It can be a combination of physicality or persona. You equitable see somebody and instantly understand that you want to see more of them or that they deserve to be on the huge screen.”

With Madison, he and his producing team of Samantha Quan and Alex Coco recalled seeing her in amazeive back-to-back turns in Once Upon a Time and Scream. “I was so blown away,” Baker recalled. “The last 15 minutes of Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood she stole scenes from Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio and I equitable thought, ‘We have to grasp our eyes on her.’ Then we saw Scream discleave outing weekfinish and while we were sitting in the theater, we determined that that’s our Anora. We called her agent the second we left the theater.”