When Ani meets Ivan in the new film Anora, it’s eyes, smiles, love spells, fireworks. Ani, played by Mikey Madison, works as a dancer at New York City’s HQ Gentlemen’s Club, when one night, a 21-year-old son of a Russian oligarch (Mark Eydelshteyn) comes in requesting a dance from someone who speaks Russian. He’s goofy, he’s zealous, his money might as well grow on trees, she’s charmed. He barely knows English, she’s not that comfortable with Russian, which she learned from her grandmother. They make do, in part because money is easy to understand, and so is sex, but also because the actors really bring their characters’ chemistry to life. She gets up off him in the middle of a dance and says, “This is not allowed, but I like you,” as she pulls down her thong. “God bless America!” he yells.
The movie has already been pretty heavily praised for its empathetic and honest portrayal of sex work. Madison has given interviews about the reverence she has for sex workers and how much personal research she put into their lives and their industry to play this role. A video circulated on the internet of an audience full of strippers and sex workers clapping their heels at the end of an Anora screening that Madison hosted. “You’re gonna be hard fucking pressed to find another movie where they gave real strippers that many jobs,” actress Lindsay Normington told Vulture.
In a Q&A following the New York Film Festival screening of the film, director Sean Baker talked about writing the script for Anora with Madison in mind. He and his producer and spouse, Samantha Quan saw her in Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 film Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood and were so impressed with her performance that they made it a point to keep tabs on the actress. Later, when they saw her in the 2022 reboot of Scream, Baker knew he had his star. Without even a script, Baker and Quan reached out to Madison’s reps and pitched her the idea over coffee. They started filming at the beginning of 2023. Some spoilers ahead.
Anora is, as widely proclaimed, a Cinderella story, but it’s also raunchy and funny like American Pie and romantic and sensual like an old Bollywood movie. There’s a wedding in Vegas. Champagne and fireworks. But then: the curtain closes on a too-good-to-be-true happily ever after. Ivan, in the shadows of his parents towering above him, takes off the husband costume and returns to his 21-year-old boy form. Anora’s beauty is in this idea that life-changing experiences, like falling in love with a billionaire, are usually not escapes from the conditions of our lives — but that they still leave us changed anyway.
Below, Anora stars Mikey Madison and Mark Eydelshteyn talk to Teen Vogue about filming in a foreign language, working on Sean Baker’s immersive set, and how they carved the personalities of their characters both in advance of shooting and in real time on set.
MM: I think Ani is someone who's so different from me, and so I was aware of that at the beginning and how much research I would need to do in preparation just to understand things about her life that are really foreign to me. Obviously the accent work and learning as much Russian as I could, research within the sex work community. And then also just the emotional work I needed to do and backstory about my character of understanding very clearly who she is, what her life is like, what her morals are. So I think I just built those things clearly in my head over time to where finally I was on set, and I felt like the pieces were able to come together in a more clear way.
ME: Mikey’s character has a very long, dramatic journey [with herself] and with other characters also, but the center of my character was the relationship with Ani, yes. The first few days, it was very stressful to me to be on set. New people and new culture and new country and new rules and because of it, I just was a little bit more goofy and weird. I tried to do more stupid jokes to just, I don’t know, maybe protect myself or to understand what's happening. Then I realized [the jokes] work on Ani, because it's like [the] relationship between these two characters. We talked about it with Sean. It's not just [a story] about a person with money and a sex worker. My task was to find that something more, the chemistry of this relationship. I realized that I just had to make Ani laugh.
MM: No, I've never attempted to speak another language before, so it was a lot of work. But also because I didn't just want to try to memorize the Russian lines and just repeat them. I wanted to, as much as possible, understand exactly what I was saying and what the other character in the scene was saying too, so that it was clear to me. So I knew that it would be a big undertaking. I remember after my first Russian session, it was like two hours long or something, I cried because I thought, I'm never going to be able to accomplish this. It just seemed impossible to me, but I'm also a very stubborn person. So I was like, now I'm going to dedicate myself even more to figuring this out and portraying it in an accurate way. So I would try to fall asleep listening to 12 hours of Russian speaking on YouTube. And yeah, Duolingo obviously, which is still bothering me! I still get notifications from Duolingo, like do you still want to learn Russian? I'm like, no, leave me alone!
ME: And it's true. I remember how before scenes with the Russian lines, Mikey repeated 400 times to say it with the best accent she can — and her accent is great — she was really curious about the meanings of my lines. It's possible just to remember what her line will be after my Russian line. It's not even her line. I am speaking in Russian and then she's answering in English. But no, she asked me, what does it mean?
ME: It's a great question. It's a question about balance. You're right. It's impossible to understand the balance. Balance cannot be in the script because the script, it's like our [starting point], and then [building the chemistry] a big adventure and journey. And for actors, sometimes it's very difficult to catch this balance. We are playing really in character, and sometimes it can be difficult to go out of your body and mind and see what you are doing, where is the balance right now. And we had our maestro, our magician Sean. Every time when it was too much, for example, in my situation, he’d whisper to me, you have to go more. [I’d think,] it's too much. [He’d say,] No, no, no, you have to do more, more, more. It can be more funny. For example, with, “God bless America.” I said, No Sean, don't you think that the first time we see this guy, it's a little bit too much from him? He said, No, it's too much. That’s [Ivan’s part in the] balance. He's too much as a person, he's too much as a character.
MM: Yeah, I think so. I think that he is really trusting towards his actors and definitely creates an environment where he welcomes improvisation. I think also he really trusted me in terms of creating my character from the ground up. I had so many ideas, and he wanted to hear all of them. I always was trying, I would try to be intuitive and thoughtful about when improvisation was necessary. I think that in a lot of situations, like Ani is someone who doesn't really think before she speaks, she just says something. And so for me, I needed to not think about it too much and just feel whatever the character is feeling and just say it.
ME: The interesting thing with Sean…like we could already be on the set, and the light already can be on the light points. Drew Daniels, our amazing cinematographer, can already [set the shot up] and be beside the camera. And Sean can say, Stop one second. I have to think about this. Stop. And it can be about five minutes or seven minutes and 10 minutes. And it’s complete silence on the set, and we are waiting. And [at one point,] I realized that he's editing. At that moment he's editing the scene.
ME: I said bubble?
ME: Oh, okay, hi to my English. (laughs). It's like our atmosphere and our set. Sometimes you're going to work, and you do your scenes, then other people are doing other scenes. I’ve had this experience when you're working, and then you turn on and turn off the story. And our set, it was full of freedom and love and experiment and exploring. I was always turned on to the story, always turned on to the character. It was only one way for us to be useful…to be in this energy. Not to lose it.
MM: It was [immersive] more so than any film I've ever done before or show just because of the way that Sean shoots. Also, I left my home in Los Angeles, moved to Brighton Beach, and I was speaking in a different dialect and completely moved my life to play this character. And to me it felt like my entire life was revolving around this story and Ani. So it was easy for me to feel immersed in that. And also there were times where we would be shooting and we would be stealing shots inside restaurants or pool halls where people didn't know we were filming. And I think inherently that's just an incredibly immersive experience, that very high breadth guerilla filmmaking. Also my character when she's working in the club, especially the first 10 minutes of the film, it's all improvised. They just created a live club where the music was blasting, girls are dancing, and clients are waiting to be spoken to. I was able to just walk up to each person one by one and create those conversations. The line was definitely blurred between movie set and this really strange real experience.
MM: I love Brighton Beach. I've never lived somewhere where I was able to walk to so many places. I'm a California girl from Los Angeles, so I'm used to driving everywhere. So just because of that it was amazing. But also to live in such an insular community where the history and the culture is so rich because of all the people that moved there. It was really interesting. All of the restaurants, all of the grocery stores were very specific to that culture and so I really loved it there.
ME: When Sean, Sammy [Quan] and Mikey were there [at Cannes] and Vache [Tovmasyan, who plays Garnick] and Karren [Karagulian, who plays Toros], I was already on another set in a clinic for [psychiatric patients]. I can't remember who called me and said that we won the Palme D’or, but I just started running, saying, We won the Palme D’or! We won the Palme D’or! And everybody looked at me like I was mentally ill. Nobody believed in me. I thought Yes, it's exactly for this moment we are living in this life. It's very amazing and very funny and impossible.
