Mikey Madison attends the New York premiere of Anora on Oct. 15.Jason Mendez/Getty Images
Mikey Madison really knows how to scream. In Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) and Scream (2022), she does it with her whole body, in a sustained pitch, at ear-splitting volume, to her characters’ last breaths, even as they die in flames. As Max, the eldest daughter in the F/X series Better Things, Madison perfected a whine, a seven-syllable “Mom,” equal parts rebuke and demand. Now, in her new film, Anora, she plays the title character, an exotic dancer who talks tough, but has learned the hard way to scream only on the inside.
Anora “Ani” Mikheeva lives next to the subway in the Russian neighbourhood of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, where she works in a flashy, bottle-service gentleman’s club. Behind the scenes, her colleagues trade stories about the men who pay them for lap dances – “He said I look like his 18-year-old daughter, and then he bought five songs” – but on the floor, they perform perfect docility, whatever fantasy of a woman their clients want.
Because Ani speaks Russian, she’s tapped to cater to Ivan (Vanya) Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn), the bratty teenage son of a staggeringly wealthy Russian oligarch. He invites her to his bloated mansion (filmed at the home of a genuine oligarch), pays her for sex (she snickers discreetly at how quickly he finishes), and keeps paying her to be his “horny girlfriend.” For a while, Ani’s cynicism holds – she’s going to get all she can out of this kid – but after a private jet ride to a lavish Las Vegas suite, Vanya proposes.
It’s one of the film’s centrepiece scenes, and Madison nails it. “Do you mean it?” she keeps asking Vanya, as the camera circles their hotel bed. “But do you mean it?” The audience holds its breath as this girl – this flinty girl who knows better, because she knows these kinds of men – buys into the fairytale.
“He’s gambling more than what he’s paying her for the week. It’s all dangling in her face,” Madison, 25, said in a joint interview with her writer/director, Sean Baker, during September’s Toronto International Film Festival, where Anora was named second-runner-up for the People’s Choice Award. “The life he has is one she’d kill for.”
But it’s not just about lifestyle for Ani – she’s also risking her heart. “She’s letting go,” Baker says, “to a boy who is 100 per cent ignorant to her hopes and dreams. For me it’s a tragic moment. I’ve heard audiences cheer when Ani and Vanya run to the Little White Chapel. I almost want to cry out, ‘Don’t cheer for that!’” As you may have guessed, the princess moment does not last.
Ani is the latest in a line of Sean Baker characters – Sin-Dee Rella, the transgender sex worker in Tangerine; Halley, the single mom living in a crappy motel in the shadow of Disney World in The Florida Project – who are resilient but dismissed by society as less-than. “I’m interested in the way they have to fight to be seen, to have the respect given to them that they deserve,” Baker says. “I think that makes a powerful lead character: somebody whom the audience can see deserves respect, so let’s root for her.”
Anora, like much of Baker’s work, is an on-the-ground exploration of what economic inequity really feels like – the behaviours that wealth condones and insulates people from, and the victims of that, who are left to sweep up the pieces, after hours, when their victimizers have moved on. “Look at the class divide in the U.S., in the world, which is only growing,” Baker says. “It’s impossible to ignore, and if you do, it’s almost irresponsible. It’s vital we discuss this topic. But I don’t want to preach; that divides people. I just want to put the discussion out there.”
A few years ago, Baker “tried the Hollywood route” to making films, shopping an earlier version of a script set in Brighton Beach to producers. “The minute they read it they were like, ‘We’re gonna get Ryan Gosling, Tom Hardy, they’ll do Russian accents.’ I’m like, ‘No! That’s not how I want to make movies!’” He prefers to work independently, to retain control of story and casting.
For Anora, Baker hired a mix of trained actors and Brighton Beach locals (including some of the strippers), many Russian or Armenian, including his frequent collaborator, Karren Karagulian. Karagulian plays Toros, an enforcer who works for Vanya’s parents; along with two henchmen, he spends the second half of the film trying to get Ani to go away. “I wanted a motley crew, in which everyone was on a different rung of hierarchy,” Baker says. “I wanted to explore those power dynamics, how one treats somebody on the rung just below them.”
That leads to the film’s other centrepiece scene: an extended comic fight in which Ani holds her own against Toros and his thugs. It’s her chance to unleash the inner scream she’s been tamping down. “It was important for me to do my own stunts, to feel the things Ani was feeling, so there was no faking,” says Madison, who speaks quietly and precisely. “But it’s not something you can practise. Ani is very different from me. She’s always ready for a fight. She doesn’t pause to think about what she says, she just says it. I was constantly exerting a lot of energy to play her.”
The scene I can’t get out of my head is an earlier one, in which Ani performs a sexy dance for Vanya as he lolls on the plush sofa in his vast living room. She’s done up in sex-shop studded black leather, writhing on the floor for all she’s worth, clapping her thighs together, then spreading them wide. He’s scrolling on his phone, barely looking at her. She’s just one more thing he’s bought, one more toy he’s already bored with. It makes me want to scream.
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