Filmmaker Sean Baker has spent the past two decades telling the stories of people who are most often relegated to the margins of not only fiction, but of society at large. Sex workers, addicts, unhoused people, undocumented immigrants, trans women and folks who haven’t been given a fair shake — if they’ve found themselves overlooked or mocked by mainstream American audiences, then they’ve probably found themselves represented by a Sean Baker film.
Anora, the New Jersey-born writer-director-editor’s latest, follows the titular 23-year-old exotic dancer, portrayed by Mikey Madison. Anora, who prefers “Ani,” lives in Brooklyn’s heavily Russian American Brighton Beach neighborhood and works at Manhattan’s upscale strip club HQ, where she meets Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn) — the spoiled-rotten heir of a Russian oligarch. He’s immature and impetuous, but his immense wealth, his perpetual good nature and his predilection for keeping the vibes light are intoxicating. After a whirlwind week providing Ivan with the “girlfriend experience,” Ani finds herself in Vegas, marrying the 21-year-old son of a billionaire on a whim.
Baker’s depiction of Ani and her fellow sex workers — many of them played by real-life strippers — feels neither exploitative, condescending, vilifying nor glorifying. It simply feels honest.
“Sean’s dedicated a lot of his career to trying to help destigmatize that kind of work,” Madison tells the Scene during a video call. “And so I knew that he would be approaching it with a lot of respect and a lot of thoughtfulness.”
After seeing Madison’s work in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and 2022’s Scream, Baker approached her with a “general, loose sort of idea” for what Anora would become. Over the course of about a year, the two got to know and trust each other as Baker further developed the idea and his script. When it came time to shoot, Madison found that working with first-time actors — something Baker has also done in previous films like Starlet, Tangerine and 2017’s remarkable The Florida Project — helped her performance.
“I’ve never had that experience before, but I was excited about it because I think it brings a lot of authenticity and honesty to those worlds and the stories that he is interested in telling,” Madison tells the Scene. “And it was also exciting for me as an actress, because it meant there was no phoning it in. I needed to completely commit myself to the process and preparation of this character so that I don’t stand out. I didn’t want to look like an actress. I wanted to look like one of the girls. I wanted [Ani] to be a fully fleshed-out, honest, real character. And I think that working with all these incredible people who have similar lived experience to Ani, it added a lot of layers into the film.”
Since this is a Sean Baker film, it isn’t all honeymooning and happily ever after for Ani and her entitled, bong-ripping husband. When the other shoe drops, Ivan’s father sends his lackeys — Ivan’s frazzled godfather Toros (Karren Karagulian), hapless Armenian henchman Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and the tender, soft-eyed Igor (Yura Borisov) — to clean up the boy’s mess. Their arrival kicks off the film’s second act with a bang — a long sequence featuring a physical altercation that, according to Madison, consumed eight of the production’s 36 shooting days.
“It was very physically demanding — very difficult to shoot,” she says. “Emotionally exhausting, physically exhausting, but it was such an important set piece. Sean and I and [Borisov] and [cinematographer Drew Daniels] spent a lot of time in rehearsal, the nights before, mapping out where we would be at each moment, how to use the space in an interesting way and where I would be at each moment, and what what would happen here and there. … But also during shooting, so much evolved. We were constantly rewriting things, and the scene was evolving a bit. So it was total chaos. But in a good way — the chaos that Sean has mastered.”
Mark Eydelshteyn and Mikey Madison in Anora
What follows that sequence is a whirlwind of circumstances reminiscent of high-stakes one-night-in-the-city thrillers like the Safdie brothers’ Good Time and Michael Mann’s Collateral. But like Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, it’s also a comedy of errors — Baker knows the absurdity and stupidity of reality far too well to make self-serious films.
From there, it’s not a matter of if the emotional weight of these events will hit Ani, but when. The journey toward that destination is equal parts explicit, hilarious and heartbreaking. Madison carries it all well, playing Ani as a force of nature who’s self-assured and impulsive, but also at times incredibly vulnerable — and always lovingly, compassionately framed by Baker.
“It completely changed my body,” says Madison of the role. “It changed everything. It changed me emotionally as well. I mean, I felt so differently about myself. I felt like I was carrying myself with a different confidence. It gave me a sensuality in my physicality that I didn’t have before. I had a different awareness of my body. … It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do physically, and it was very painful to dance like that.”
Ultimately, she says, though it was difficult to part ways with the cast and crew she’d grown close with, it wasn’t as hard to part with the character. With one exception.
“I will say I found myself feeling really weird and naked without the acrylic nails.”
