Mikey Madison makes a big splash with 'Anora'

After Mikey Madison’s dad saw “Anora” for the first time, he spent some 15 minutes buttonholing the director, Sean Baker.

“He had lots to say,” Madison adds with a smile. “It’s interesting to have parents who are psychologists. I get to understand character on a deeper level, so I’m grateful for that.”

But some of those more adult scenes?

They might have fueled part of the discussion.

In the acclaimed film (which won the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or), Madison plays the title character, a sex worker who enters into a relationship with the son of a Russian oligarch. He proposes, she accepts and, quickly, his parents are in the United States to quaff whatever might be happening.

To play her intended, Baker hired Mark Eydelshteyn, a Russian actor considered his country’s Timothee Chalamet.

“We had people who were able to translate on the set … but I was very selfish. I said, ‘Speak English to me,’” Madison explains.

Luckily Eydelshteyn had been studying English since middle school and speaks it well. “Even if it was difficult at times, we would just laugh.”

Because scenes take place in his character’s lavish bedroom, there are plenty of moments of intimacy. Thankfully, Madison says, “we had a trust and understanding with each other that we were going to take care of each other during those scenes. We spent a lot of time talking about it. (The scenes) are funny, not serious and they’re sort of innocent in a way because there’s nothing threatening about it. They’re not too romantic, necessarily. He’s clearly a kid.”

Filming those scenes was a positive experience because the process was so streamlined. “We were able to do them quickly and sort of provoke this fun, light energy.”

While she speaks Russian in the film, Madison only learned what she needed to know. More important was her Brooklyn accent.

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To get it right, she worked with a dialogue coach, then embedded with locals.

“I lived in New York for about a month before shooting started and I was able to immerse myself in the community,” the California native says. “I was able to fine-tune the accent, go to clubs, listen and pull from other places to get it where I felt happy with it and it was just coming from me very naturally.”

While Anora goes through a lot of changes in a short period of time, she found her way into Madison’s heart. “I fell in love with her as a character,” she says. “When I’m playing a character, I have to, at least for me, fully empathize. I have to be their No. 1 supporter. I’m just the vessel for this character. I’m really only thinking about things in life from her perspective.”

While Anora and Vanya (Eydelshteyn’s character) go through a fairy tale relationship, Madison wonders if it was true love.

“I think she was in love with the idea of being married to him,” she explains. “I think she saw love as a possibility of something that could happen for her. She fell in love with his lifestyle – this incredible life that he lives – and so, of course, she’d fall in love with that.

“It’s also not uncommon for women to meet their husbands at work.”

While “Anora” is Madison’s biggest role to date, the twenty-something actress had a regular role on “Better Things,” played a member of the Manson family in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” and starred in the fifth “Scream” film.

“Anora,” however, is one that could crack things open. Already, there’s Oscar talk.

“I feel like I’m sort of in a place of transition right now,” Madison says. “I’m just processing everything and I’m so lucky to be able to do the work that I do because it’s my dream.”

When she was cast in the role, “I really had no expectations. I just wanted to do as good a job as I possibly could….and it was a beautiful experience for me. Everything that has happened after the film has been released has been a pleasant surprise.”