Oscars 2025: Best Actress Contender Mikey Madison On the Year’s Most Acclaimed Performance in ‘Anora’ [VIDEO]

Mikey Madison’s most high-profile roles unfortunately saw her fall prey to the exact same ending.

As both Susan “Sadie” Atkins in 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Amber Freeman in 2002’s Scream, Madison’s characters met their untimely ends after being literally burned alive. The methods of her execution were, of course, wildly different. Once is famous for Leonardo DiCaprio’s flamethrower sequence while Scream‘s Amber catches fire on a stove during a climactic fight sequence. Audiences began to wonder if Madison would somehow make a career of being incinerated.

But all of that changes with her role as “Ani” in Sean Baker’s brilliant Anora.

“I think that was a pleasant surprise. I’m very grateful to Sean for not writing that in the script,” Madison laughed in our video interview. “Yeah, no more fire for me unless I play Joan of Arc or something.”

Free from open flame, “Ani” is an exotic dancer / sex worker who becomes the object of obsession of Mark Eidelstein’s “Vanya.” Their impromptu Las Vegas wedding sets into motion a wild series of events, and “Ani” discovers she can only rely on herself. This is a transformative role for Madison, one that writer-director Sean Baker carefully crafted with her. His script affords Madison the opportunity to show a depth and range that few actresses her age can.

In this interview, Madison talks about working with Sean Baker to not only create the role of “Ani” but to also learn a great deal about the lives of sex workers. She talks about becoming so comfortable with Baker and the crew that using an onset intimacy coordinator didn’t seem necessary. Madison also talks about the physicality of a dancer and how she approached that aspect of her performance. Finally, she reveals her most challenging moment to film — a late scene in which “Ani” emotional armor crumbles.

“She doesn’t want anyone to see her emotionally vulnerable. I think that it builds up, and there’s so many unsaid things and feelings that are repressed that build up in that scene that she finally releases. To me as an actor, it was a very intimidating scene to approach, one that scared me in a way that I didn’t feel scared about any of the other scenes that we did.”

Please enjoy this interview with Mikey Madison who delivers the performance of the year.

Anora opens in limited release on Friday, October 18. It expands nationwide on November 1.