ANORA is the movie that’s bringing sex back to the Oscars after years of strait-laced stuffiness.
Its Bafta-winning leading lady Mikey Madison has told how she went to a gruelling “stripper boot camp” to train for her racy role as Russian-American club performer Anora “Ani” Mikheeva.
The 25-year-old — who won the Leading Actress gong at the London bash last week, with the film now tipped for Oscar glory — spent months researching her role, including learning pole-dancing and twerking, to make it as realistic as possible.
She said: “There were less sex scenes and more sex shots — and I think there was a lot of humour involved in it as well. It was a very positive experience for me, but also my character is a sex worker.
“It requires a lot of her body and her skin. I think she wears her nudity more like a costume.
“She presents herself in this hypersexualised way because it is how she makes a living.
“And it’s just what she has to do.”
Biggest upset
Los Angeles-born Mikey also told Variety’s Actors On Actors podcast: “I started working on the physicality of the character, because she’s a dancer.
"I did quite a bit of pole training and I did this stripper boot camp where I was taught how to give lap dances and how to twerk, which is such an important part of strip club culture and is something I didn’t know how to do.”
Until her surprise Bafta win caused the biggest upset of the night last Sunday, Mikey had been seen as the Cinderella of the awards season, losing out time and again to Demi Moore for her role in quirky horror film The Substance.
But since Anora won the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival last May, speculation that Mikey will also get an Oscar on March 2 has now reached fever pitch, while the film itself is favourite to pick up the Best Picture award.
No movie with such provocative sexual content has landed the Academy’s top prize in the past.
Whatever the outcome, for Mikey the experience of making the movie — directed by independent film-maker Sean Baker — has been positive.
She said: “Genuinely, this film has changed my life, not just because of all this stuff happening, but just the experience of making the film, the experience of collaborating with Sean.”
Mikey, who has a twin brother and two sisters, was raised by her psychologist parents in the San Fernando Valley, an unfashionable suburb of LA.
She competed as a horse rider before switching to acting at the age of 14, even though there were no actors in the family.
She played Manson Family member Susan “Sadie” Atkins in Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 comedy drama Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, and teenage killer Amber Freeman in the 2022 horror flick Scream.
But she remained a relative unknown until Sean offered her the lead role in Anora as soon as he met her.
Mikey recalled: “We had coffee, we chatted, he pitched me a very loose idea for what the script might be. “It was more of a Russian gangster film.
“But there was still the same storyline of essentially a young woman who realises that she married the wrong man when it’s too late.
“He said, ‘I haven’t written this yet, but if you want to do it, I will write it for you’. And I said, ‘Absolutely, I would love to’.
“There’s a part of me — even though he had offered me the role and I accepted during our coffee meeting — where I was like, ‘Oh, do I actually really still have the role?’ And so I made my agent reach out and ask, just to triple-check.”
Mikey spent months honing every detail of the character, from learning Russian to shopping for clothes and even choosing the fake nails, declaring that Anora’s life was “a completely different universe in every single way” to her own.
She said: “My favourite thing in the whole world is film-making, so to be a part of it, making a film like Anora, was just really freaking special. I had to bring this character to life, to really build her from the ground up.
“Sean really cared about what I had to say, and listened. “I remember maybe a month into knowing him, I was like, “I’m really going to have to let go of my impostor syndrome and just embrace this process because I’m realising how much he actually cares about my opinion.
“I had to try to immerse myself as much as possible. I read memoirs written by sex workers, I spoke to consultants that were brought on to the film, I went to clubs, I shadowed dancers, I got dances.
Instant connection
“I was trained by a dancer based in Los Angeles so I could try to represent them as best as possible.
“Eventually it all just kind of came together to form the character.
“I had been doing months and months of really serious dance training and pole training.
“And there came a point where it was a couple of weeks to filming and I was like, ‘I should maybe send Sean a couple of videos so he knows what I have been up to this past four months’.”
Mikey says she formed a strong bond with Russian co-star Mark Eydelshteyn, who portrays playboy Vanya Zakharov on screen.
She said: “There was an instant connection. He’s very charming but there was definitely, at the beginning, a really big language barrier.
This film has changed my life. It was really freaking special. I had to let go of my imposter syndrome and build this character from the ground up’
Mikey Madison
“Maybe the second day we knew each other, he was trying to tell me this story, saying he was looking out of this big window and he was like, ‘And the whole world was on the tip of my nipple’.
“I was like, ‘I think you’re trying to say something else’, and he said, ‘No, no, no, the tip of my nipple’.
“I was like, ‘OK!’ I think he was trying to say the whole world was in the palm of his hand.
“We really quickly had to build trust with each other, and we did. It was a pleasure working with him.”
Mikey also filmed her own stunts, including a brutal fight scene in which she told Sean: “The more brawl, the better.”
She said: “There’s vases being kicked and lamps falling over — a pretty crazy situation. And so that was really tightly choreographed and it sometimes felt like we were shooting it for ever.”
A special screening for sex workers was held in the States, and Mikey said: “We filled an entire theatre with people from that community.
“It really meant a lot to me that I represented that community, even in just a small way.
“Girls were coming up to me afterwards saying, ‘This happened to my friend’, or, ‘Oh my gosh, you remind me so much of my best friend at the club’, or, ‘I love this film’.”
And in her Bafta acceptance speech last week, Mikey showed her support for the community, saying: “You deserve respect and human decency. I will always be your ally, and I urge others to do the same.”
