To paraphrase Chappell Roan: It’s a Madison-onemon! Mikey Madison stars as the title character in Sean Baker’s Anora this year, and she — how do we put this lightly? — absolutely eats. She put on her Brooklyn accent, she took off her clothes, and she delivered a performance that is somehow both the comedic and dramatic best of the year as the brash Ani. The film, which premiered at Cannes, won the Palme d’Or, and Madison has been a permanent fixture of the Oscar conversation ever since, making her way onto the BAFTA longlist on January 3.
And yet, despite a top-notch performance, Madison has a tough road to hoe if she wants gold. For starters, the Best Actress Oscar has not gone to ingenues in recent years like it did in the 2010s, per our awards columnist, Nate Jones. (Think J.Law, Brie Larson, La La Land–era Emma Stone). Also, Madison, at this point, doesn’t have much of a public persona. Baker knew her from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood … and the Scream franchise, and some know her for her work as the teenage daughter on Pamela Adlon’s Better Things. Still, she’s something of a blank slate publicly — she’s a 25-year-old without any public social media. So, we’ll be tracking Madison’s star power from Cannes hopefully through the Oscars, including the expected stops along the way, like the THR roundtable, and the unpredictable moments, like her first controversy, to see just how a star is born.
Cannes Film Festival
May 21, 2024: Notably, before Cannes begins, Vulture does not even include Anora on our list of 11 movies we’re most excited to see during the festival. By the end of the festival, the movie wins the Palme and Madison is a front-runner for Best Actress. In her first major piece of press during the Anora cycle, a Vogue scene report from the festival on May 23, Madison is positioned as a classic ingenue. She’s at her first festival, it’s her first time in France, and it’s all a dream — plus, notably, she’s a cinephile. “It’s been a dream of mine since I started acting to one day come to Cannes with a film,” she says. “I genuinely feel like the luckiest girl in the world.” In another profile, by WWD, her status as Baker’s muse is the focus. She’s quoted as saying: “He was very willing to just be open and really wanted to collaborate with me on that level. It was very unique and special.”
A glossy mag profile
August 26, 2024: Madison begins her press rollout in earnest, and something becomes very clear: Despite the high-octane feistiness of her character in the film, Madison is a much more low-key personality. “I’m a good girl, really, and I’ve always been a good girl,” she says in an August 26 Esquire profile. “I’ve never broken the rules or done bad things.”
Anora’s release
October 18, 2024: Neon releases Anora in a prime fall slot, ensuring the movie coasts into award season without ever leaving voters’ minds.
Madison does much of her YouTube appearances (where all the biggest PR triumphs are made in 2024) alongside Baker. In their scene breakdown for Vanity Fair, which comes out October 17, Madison and Baker have a sweet, awkward chemistry. She’s interested in both the practicalities and the more analytical elements of filmmaking. At one point, she references her character’s love interest adjusting Ani’s top. “He’s taking liberties, but he’s also covering her, which I think is something interesting,” she notes. Baker responds, “Hmmm, yeah.”
Her first nomination
October 29, 2024: On October 29, Madison scores her first awards recognition when she is nominated for Outstanding Lead Performance at the 2024 Gotham Awards. The Gothams do not separate by acting categories by gender, and they are not necessarily the best Oscar prognosticators — Charles Melton won Best Supporting Performance last year for May December then went on lose out on even a nomination at the Oscars. Still, with her co-nominees including Nicole Kidman (Babygirl) and Adrien Brody (The Brutalist), it shows that she’s on the right path.
Awards-column darling
November 26, 2024: Notably, in press where she is with Baker — like the November 26 L.A. Times profile of both — her shyness is less central. Instead that profile spends more time on the film’s explicit scenes. Madison recounts how her father built her a stripper pole in their home so she could practice. Training for a role is second only to a physical transformation in the eyes of Hollywood voters. We’ll see how it pays off with Golden Globe nominations on December 9.
Golden Globes
December 9, 2024: Madison scored her first Golden Globe nomination on December 9 — an expected honor that is nonetheless an important goalpost for her hit if she’s going to get an Oscar win or nomination. She, and Anora at large, is nominated in the Comedy or Musical category, which is potentially category fraud and also tough for her chances. She’ll have to face off against some glitzy and glamorous divas, like Cynthia Erivo for Wicked and Demi Moore for The Substance, and the Globes loves drama. Still, it also loves a newcomer (remember when Rachel Bloom won for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend?), so Madison could still feasibly barnstorm and take the win.
Madison was also nominated at the Spirit Awards, and Anora was a top-ten film- of-2024 honoree by the American Film Institute. Still, it’s looking more and more like she could become an also-ran: She lost at the NBR Awards and the NYFCC Awards, and she’d have to defy gravity in comparison to the extremely flashy press tours of her competitors (cough, cough, Wicked). As “nominations” need to turn to “wins,” ingenue won’t be enough.
Internet Virality
December 19, 2024: The internet comes for us all eventually. As awards season gains momentum, it’s no surprise that Anora has become more and more discoursed, both positively and negatively, with some claiming the movie is a masterpiece and others saying it’s just another example of the male gaze. In press, Madison and Baker are, for the first time, pretty much severed — he’s in “Directors on Directors” talking with Brady Corbet, while she’s conversing with Pamela Anderson in “Actors on Actors.” And, after “Actors on Actors,” Madison’s own comments become discourse fodder for the first time — specifically, her comments on how she, her co-star Mark Eydelshteyn, Baker, and their producer decided not to have an intimacy coordinator. “We decided it would be best just to keep it small, with just us,” Madison tells Anderson. “We were able to just really streamline it.”
In response, many people feel it was inappropriate for Madison to be allowed to choose not to have an intimacy coordinator. Others say the whole thing was blown out of proportion. And still others get a little misogynistic with it. It becomes so discussed that memes about the discourse proliferate as well. It’s a first look at what the conversation around Madison might look like throughout the rest of awards season, but it’s notable that the discourse has not yet touched her as an individual — her lack of social-media presence means she’s never replying, and no interviewers have asked her about her own controversies yet. And if they do, maybe they should ask her about Club Chalamet’s angry tweet.
The Roundtable
January 3, 2025: The Hollywood Reporter’s annual roundtable is one of the year’s highest-stake press opportunities for any performer. Rarely do all parties involved get equal playing time, and if one person takes over as moderator, it’s easy for this to become basically a solo press junket. For the shy, press-green Madison, the pitfalls are a bit unavoidable. Throughout the hour-long roundtable, Madison talks a total of three times, and one of those is when she’s prompted by Tilda Swinton to say the age she was when she began acting. Still, she does some networking: Madison brought her dog, Jam, who got to hang out with Zendaya’s pup, Noon, and Demi Moore’s theater-critic Chihuahua, Pilaf.
The Criterion Collection
January 3, 2025: On the very same day that the roundtable is posted, Criterion posts Madison’s visit to the Criterion Closet. And this is like a fish in water — Madison, as has been documented since Cannes, is a huge film buff, and this gives her a chance to talk about her favorite movies. She waxes rhapsodic about Isabelle Huppert’s noises in The Piano Teacher and gives credit to Jackie Coogan, who paved the way for child actors (like herself, when she was on Better Things) to have money kept aside for them that isn’t accessible by their parents.