Actor Mikey Madison is having a career-defining moment.
With less than 10 feature film acting credits under her belt, Madison is now an Oscar winner. The 25-year-old Anora star was named Best Actress at the 97th Academy Awards on March 2. A home-schooled former horseback rider who only started acting professionally in 2013, Madison beat out a vaunted list of nominees including Cynthia Erivo, Demi Moore, Fernanda Torres, and Karla Sofía Gascon.
“I also just want to recognize the thoughtful, intelligent, beautiful, breathtaking work of my fellow nominees. I’m honored to be recognized alongside all of you,” Madison said. “This is a dream come true; I’m probably going to wake up tomorrow.”
Madison generated critical acclaim for her work on Anora, the Sean Baker-directed comedy-drama. The movie won five awards from six nominations at the Oscars, including Best Director for Baker, Film Editing, Original Screenplay, and Best Picture.
While Madison’s meteoric rise to the A-list might seem as much a whirlwind as the marriage her Anora character finds herself in after a Las Vegas weekend with an oligarch’s son, the young actor has actually been paying her dues in the industry for longer than most might realize. In fact, this isn’t even the first Best Picture nominated film Madison has acted in.
Before acting, she rode horses
Born Mikaela Madison Rosberg in March 1999, alongside her twin brother, Miles, Madison was raised in California’s San Fernando Valley by her two psychologist parents. Although she grew up loving movies (citing Stand By Me, The Hunger Games, and Pretty in Pink to The Cut as formative films for her), her initial career aspirations were of the equestrian variety.
From the seventh grade on, she told The Cut, “I literally homeschooled myself so I could be at the barn all day with my pony.” But by age 14, she caught the acting bug. “I loved the ritual of getting to the barn and taking care of my horse, but it’s kind of an isolating sport,” she explained. “I felt called in another direction.”
Her mother enrolled her in acting classes, and soon, Madison obtained a manager and started booking roles in short films as well as a low-budget feature (Liza, Liza, Skies Are Grey, directed by Oscar-winner Terry Sanders) that ultimately didn’t debut until 2017. By then, Madison had already landed a major television role that established her as a star on the rise.
She landed a major TV role before she’d turned 18
In 2016, Madison was cast in the FX dramedy Better Things as the eldest daughter of the show’s co-creator and star, Pamela Adlon. As Madison explained in a video for the Criterion Collection, she was still underage when she landed the role, which meant her initial earnings went into a special blocked trust fund called a Coogan account, named after the most celebrated child star of the silent film era, Jackie Coogan (whose work in Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid Madison has expressed admiration).
Better Things would ultimately run for five seasons and earned a Peabody Award in 2017. While the series was still on the air, Madison made a pair of appearances as the younger version of actor Inbar Lavi on the Bravo series Imposters and landed small roles in two feature films, the courtroom thriller Monster and the indie ensemble drama Nostalgia.
In 2019, acclaimed director Quentin Tarantino debuted his latest film, Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, a portrait of the waning days of 1960s Hollywood and the looming specter of the Manson murders. While the movie’s two leads were established stars, Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt (in a role that won him an Oscar), Tarantino filled out the cast with young actors who have go on to dominate: Maya Hawke, Sydney Sweeney, Austin Butler, and in the role of murderous Manson Family member Susan Atkins, Mikey Madison.
As Madison told Jimmy Kimmel in 2024, Tarantino was one her inspirations to become an actor, so when she got the call to audition for the film, she went “all out”:
“I think I was 19 years old, and I was like ‘This is my one opportunity to meet Quentin Tarantino’ so I was like ‘I’m just going to go all out.’ So I did a lot of research into the Manson family, and I found out that they would take a lot of acid trips together. So I painted this painting like my character was on this wild acid trip, and I wrote a very dramatic poem to Charles Manson on the back. I cut off a piece of my hair and sewed it in, and I like very dramatically performed it to Quentin, and I guess he liked it.”
Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood received critical acclaim and was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards that year. Madison’s work in the movie is remembered by fans both for her strikingly frantic performance and her shockingly brutal death (via flamethrower). And it wouldn’t be Madison’s last time appearing in a particularly violent motion picture.
Her role in Scream caught the attention of Anora’s Sean Baker
The following year, Madison was cast in the legacy sequel Scream (2022), the first film in the iconic slasher movie franchise in eleven years and the first without horror legend Wes Craven at the helm. The movie proved a success, both financially and critically, with Madison’s work as the “ranting paranoiac Amber” singled out by critics.
One of the many filmgoers who showed up to Scream on opening weekend was indie film director Sean Baker. Within a few days, as Madison recounted in an interview with Esquire, Baker reached out to her to have coffee.
Baker, a filmmaker lauded for his low-budget films often focused on people living on the fringes of society, had been considering what his next feature would be. As Madison’s Anora co-star Yura Borisov recounted, Baker had approached him when the two had met at the Cannes Film Festival in 2021, where Borisov drew praise for his work in the Finnish film Compartment Number 6 and Baker debuted his then-newest film, the sex worker–focused Red Rocket.
Knowing he wanted to find a part for this young Russian actor, and drawing on his own experience filming Russian weddings and social functions in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach neighborhood, Baker began formulating ideas for a film. And evidently, when he saw Madison in Scream, it all came together.
“He had a proposition,” Esquire recounts of Baker and Madison’s coffee meeting, “If she agreed to star in Anora, he would start writing the script for her then and there.” There was no audition process, no script, but Madison took a leap of faith, saying their collaboration felt “written in the stars.”
Madison dove deep into developing her character, learning the Russian dialogue her character speaks to ingratiate herself with Vanya, a wealthy oligarch’s son. She took classes for the pole-dancing her character performs throughout the first act of the movie and insisted on doing her own stunts.
That hard work paid off. Anora premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where it received the prestigious Palme D’Or, the festival’s highest honor. Despite Baker’s relatively outsider status in awards season (only one film of his had thus far netted a single Oscar nomination, Best Supporting Actor for Willem Dafoe in The Florida Project), Anora was viewed as an early frontrunner for the 2025 Academy Awards, with much of the focus going to the “breakout” performance of Mikey Madison.
When nomination morning came this January, Anora picked up six nominations, including Best Picture. Mikey Madison became a Best Actress nominee for what was only her ninth feature film. As awards season continued, and Anora won a number of significant precursor prizes from awards bodies like the Producers Guild of America, Director’s Guild of America, and Writer’s Guild of America, the acting awards Madison had been up for had all ultimately gone to her main competition this season, veteran actor Demi Moore in her transformative role in the body horror film The Substance.
But in recent weeks, the tide showed signs of turning. Madison beat out Moore for both the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role and the Independent Spirit Award for Best Lead Performance, shaking up the Oscar race.
And on the biggest stage in Hollywood, that momentum carried the film, director Baker, and Madison to an unforgettable night.
Michale Natale is a News Editor for the Hearst Enthusiast Group. As a writer and researcher, he has produced written and audio-visual content for more than fifteen years, spanning historical periods from the dawn of early man to the Golden Age of Hollywood. His stories for the Enthusiast Group have involved coordinating with organizations like the National Parks Service and the Secret Service, and travelling to notable historical sites and archaeological digs, from excavations of America’ earliest colonies to the former homes of Edgar Allan Poe.
