At the heart of Sean Baker’s film Anora is Mikey Madison. Having seen her work in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Scream, Baker cast her as Ani, a young woman working as a dancer in a New York strip joint and living in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach neighborhood. When Ani impulsively marries a rich but immature client (Mark Eydelshteyn), his oligarch father and mother descend from Russia in a bid to annul the union. For Madison, preparation and authenticity were key, so she set about not only learning Russian and dance, but cultivating a deep understanding of the world of sex workers.DEADLINE: I read a piece written by a sex worker saying your character in Anora is the most respectful and real representation they’ve seen.

MIKEY MADISON: That was the ultimate goal, I think, for me, and why I wanted to do so much research and dive into this and how important it was for this character, so that’s so wonderful. I read Andrea [Werhun]’s memoir. It’s called Modern Whore. It’s amazing. She’s a beautiful writer, and she talks about her life as a sex worker, as an escort and a dancer in her early twenties. And just the way that she spoke about her sexuality and her life, her sense of humor, was something I just really connected with, and I was so intrigued by her as a person. I felt that Ani would be able to relate to her in some way. I liked how she spoke about things. She was also a consultant on the film, and she was able to answer lots of questions, talk through certain scenes with me, and it added so much nuance and so many important layers to the film and character, little, tiny things that only a sex worker would know that we were able to put into the film.

DEADLINE: What’s an example of one of the small things she told you about that mattered?

MADISON: Andrea was talking about locker room chatter, things that you say to someone, what food she brings as her lunch to eat in the break room, little things like that. Kennady [Schneider], my dance instructor, taught me how to blow dry my Pleasers [shoes] so that they fit my feet—all these little details that were so important. She told stories that really inspired me and, I think, informed some of the improvisation. And Luna [Sofía Miranda], who plays Lulu in the film, we became friends, and she’s wonderful and was so generous sharing stories and had such a great sense of humor about her job. It’s hard to think of just one thing, because that was everything for bringing the character to life. If I hadn’t have done that, it would be a completely different character and story, I think. It was the most important thing I did.

DEADLINE: Lindsay Normington, who plays Diamond, is also a stripper and activist for sex workers in L.A. What did you learn from her?

MADISON: She’s an amazing person, incredible dancer, just a funny, beautiful, intelligent woman. And honestly, while we were filming, we didn’t have a chance to get to know each other very well, which I actually think was a blessing because I really like her as a person, but we needed to have that distance, I think, to be able to say and do the things that we do to each other. 

She was just very committed to throwing herself into those scenes with me. There’s a scene where we fight each other, and filming it, I think it was even more brutal than what is shown on screen. We were really just scrapping with each other. And there’s not many actresses who want to put themselves in that situation and get in there with me, and she was so willing to do it. She brought so much realism to her character, and her lived experience, I think, really informed her performance. Working alongside all of these women, where I’m the only person who does not have that lived experience, really pushed me to want to dive even deeper into the research and the character and that community because I didn’t want to stand out in a bad way. I wanted Ani to be this real, authentic, honest person and the depiction of sex work to mirror that.

Mark Eydelshteyn and Mikey Madison in Anora.

DEADLINE: You mentioned improvisation. How much was there?

MADISON: While she’s working, the first however many minutes of the film, it’s all improvised. Her dancing, giving dances, talking to men, they just followed me around with a camera and I had a wireless mic, and I would just walk up to people, men, try to pick them up, talk to my coworkers. And they filmed that with a completely live club, so dancers were everywhere, music was blasting, customers were all over the place. With the research I had done and also my background as an actor, I was able to intuitively look at someone who I’ve never spoken to before, try to understand what kind of conversation they want, what kind of person they are, and try to cultivate some kind of chemistry and try to get them into a room for some dances. Obviously, it was contained and there’s a safety net under all of it, but I think the lines are blurred a little bit, because there’s not a camera right here, shooting an interaction. I think that the relationships and the conversations I had were much more free and honest because of that.

DEADLINE: You did your own stunts, including a big fight scene with you and two men that’s both disturbing and then funny and then disturbing again. Tell me about shooting that.

MADISON: It’s a really important sequence in the film, and I really liked the way that Sean and I were able to play with different genres and infusing comedy and this slapstick element into those scenes because it makes people laugh, and I think it also challenges an audience. I’ve heard people say afterwards that they felt really bad for laughing, or conflicted by laughing at her in those moments, and I think it’s interesting to challenge an audience like that. And so for me as an actress, I was aware of the absurdity of some of these scenes, the absurdity and the chaos of it. But obviously, Ani is not. To her, she’s fighting for her life in so many different ways, fighting to save her marriage, and also she doesn’t know what’s going to happen to her, she’s fighting for her life too. I think because of the way we shot it, you’re pulled back, and you’re able to see the absolute absurd chaos of the situation. And I think that it makes people laugh, because in these dark moments, I think that there is some humor, which is one of the reasons I love Sean as a filmmaker, because he takes a scene like that, which could, with a different filmmaker, have a very different outcome for the character, and he makes it something that you wouldn’t expect. And it was interesting to play with that.