Who Is Anora’s Mikey Madison? All About the Best Actress Oscar Winner

While Mikey is relatively new to the movie industry—with just 13 credits on her IMDb résumé before her big break—there’s no telling where her new Oscars status will take her next.

“I really don’t know what will happen in the future,” the actress told reporters. “I just want to keep making movies and continue to work with people who inspire me and play interesting characters, tell stories that are compelling. That’s just what I hope to do.”

As for her story, it’s just getting started. Here’s your crash course on the newly minted Oscar winner.

How old is Mikey Madison?

Born in 1999, Mikey is 25 years old. One of five siblings, including a twin brother, she started acting when she was 14 after having been a dedicated equestrian.

“I just had a pull towards wanting some deeper connection with other people or wanting to experience something more emotional than what I was doing,” the L.A.-raised actress told Esquire in August about trying a new path, noting she’d previously been homeschooled so she could spend more time horseback riding. “To me, that decision was simultaneously easy but also painful. I felt that if I started acting, then I’d have to commit myself 100 percent to it, and I couldn’t do that if I was still committed to horseback riding, which is very time-consuming. And so I let that part of my life go for the time being.”

What other movies has Mikey Madison been in?

After appearing in several shorts, Mikey made her film debut in 2015’s Liza, Liza, Skies Are Grey. She went on to land the role of Max, the eldest daughter of Pamela Adlon’s character Sam Fox, on Better Things, which ran from 2016 to 2022.  During that time, Mikey also appeared in movies like Nostalgia and Monster and on other TV shows like Imposters.

In 2019, she booked a role in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood as Sadie, one of killer Charles Manson‘s cultists who was famously set on fire at the end of the movie. It was a part that sparked her big break, with Sean thanking Quentin for that casting choice while accepting his Best Director trophy, acknowledging if he hadn’t put Mikey in “Once Upon a Time…,there’d be no Anora.”

However, it was Mikey’s work in 2022’s Scream that led Sean to pitch her Anora without the L.A. native even having to audition.

“He said, ‘If you want to do it, I will write it for you,’” she recalled to the Associated Press in October. “And I said, ‘Yeah, absolutely I want to.’ And from there, I think it was about a year until we were on set.”

Who does Mikey Madison play in Anora?

In Anora, Mikey plays the titular Brooklyn-based sex worker who goes by Ani. While at work, she meets Ivan—a.k.a. Vanya, the partying son of a Russian billionaire oligarch—who pays her to be his girlfriend for a week. They jet off to Las Vegas, where he asks Ani to marry him so he doesn’t have to return to Russia to start working for his father. Ani agrees, and she’s immediately swept up in Vanya’s lavish lifestyle. But things take a turn once Vanya’s parents learn of their union and they send their men to annul the marriage.

According to The Sunday Times, Mikey dove deep into the role by learning Russian, moving to New York’s Brighton Beach to work on her Brooklyn accent, practicing pole dancing, creating a Pinterest board for Ani’s look and shadowing women at clubs, which helped her improvise her interactions with the men when filming the opening scene.

“I was meeting someone for the first time,” she told the outlet, “walking up to them and giving them a lap dance from start to finish.”

What other awards has Mikey Madison won?

In addition to winning the Oscar, Mikey took home the BAFTA Award and Film Independent Spirit Award for her performance and was nominated for a Golden Globe, SAG Award and Critics Choice Award. Anora also received the top Palme d’Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival last summer.

While Mikey—who recently appeared in the TV series Lady in the Lake—has yet to reveal what’s next for her, she’s excited about what’s to come, including possibly developing her own content one day.

“I have a couple of personal stories that I’d love to work with my twin brother on,” the Academy Award winner, told The Cut in September of Miles, who earned a shout-out in her acceptance speech. “When it comes to me, I’ll be ready.”

To see who else collected a trophy on Hollywood’s big night, keep reading.