Anora Mikey Madison Sean Baker
Credit: C/O

Doing research for Sean Baker’s Anora, in which she plays an exotic dancer romanced by the son of a Russian oligarch, Mikey Madison came across the YouTube phenomenon of stripper mukbang videos. 

A mukbang (roughly translated from “eating broadcast” in Korean) is a livestream in which the subject interacts with the audience while eating lots of food. But Madison and Baker weren’t so interested in the performative, doing-this-for-views part of the mukbangs. 

“What stood out for me was the Tupperware the dancers used to carry the food,” says Madison.

“That is such an important thing,” chimes in Baker. “I’ve always been looking for those little details that are just like everyday, identifiable, common things.”

Baker is fascinated by the work part of sex work: The struggles. The problem-solving. The Tupperware. He wants to tell stories about people who work for a living, and knows that many viewers who might be bored by a movie about factory workers will be captivated by stories of sex workers.

They provide a natural fixation for the movies, a medium that often overlaps with voyeurism.

But Baker’s films show that movies about the business of sex don’t have to be lurid or gawking. They can also be open-hearted, eye-opening, and true. The writer-director has no interest in either tawdry shocks or Pretty Woman fantasies. 

“It’s a line of work and livelihood that’s quite romanticized in storytelling,” Baker says. “But when I was interviewing an adult film star years ago, halfway through our interview, she just realized at that moment that she forgot to put her clothes in the dryer that morning. And that was something that was just so normal, so everyday, so universal that we can all identify with.”

This story is from the fall issue of MovieMaker, on sale now. Photographed by Christine Bartolucci for MovieMaker. All rights reserved. Cover design by Ryan Ward. – Credit: C/O

In May, Anora won the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or, one of the highest achievements in cinema, capping more than a decade of Sean Baker films that directly or indirectly address sex work — from 2012’s Starlet to 2015’s Tangerine to 2017’s The Florida Project to 2021’s Red Rocket.

Anora follows Madison as an Uzbek-American stripper (her friends call her Ani) who is swept off her heels by Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn). He’s the filthy rich son of a Russian oligarch, and — as he explains in the film’s trailer — can stay in America if he marries an American.

Madison, a fast-rising, L.A.-born actress very open to cinematic extremes — her characters were set on fire in both 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and 2022’s Scream — drew on Ani’s tenacity to play scenes that are simultaneously moving, funny and sexually straightforward.

“The nudity to me felt like a costume,” she says. “I never felt naked, per se, while I was playing Ani, except for maybe the last scene, but I was fully clothed.”
Hearing her say this, Baker interjects: “What you just said, Mikey, I never heard that from you before. Are you saying that you felt more naked in that last scene?”

Yes, I think so. Very vulnerable,” Madison replies. “To me, that was the most fragile I felt during all of filming.”

Sean Baker on The Work

Born and raised in the New York City suburb of Summit, New Jersey, the son of a teacher and attorney, Baker attended NYU for film school and became known for DIY, bootstrap, low-budget filmmaking with his 2000 debut Four Letter Words, a blunt, comic look at the lives of young suburban males.

He followed it with Take Out, which he co-wrote and directed with Shih-Ching Tsou, who has since produced his films. Take Out was Baker’s first movie about work, the story of an undocumented Chinese immigrant and delivery man played by Charles Jang.

Baker became a hero of DIY moviemaking with Tangerine, about a transgender sex worker named Sin-Dee Rella (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) who goes on a journey through L.A. in search of her cheating boyfriend. Set around the holidays, it is currently No. 4 on Rotten Tomatoes’ list of the 100 Best Christmas Movies of All Time. 

Many have made the now-hackneyed observation that today anyone can make a movie with a phone. But Tangerine was one of the first films to prove it could be done beautifully. It was shot on iPhones, with images made more immaculate by technology including an anamorphic adapter for widescreen. 

The acclaim for Tangerine drew the A-list talents of Willem Dafoe to Baker’s next film, The Florida Project, the story of a young mom named Halley (Bria Vinaite) who turns to solicitation to provide for her six-year-old, Moonee (Brooklynn Prince), and shield her from the pain of the world. 

When Covid struck and another planned project couldn’t happen as planned, Baker and his team decamped for Texas to make 2022’s Red Rocket, the story of a washed-up porn star named Mikey Saber (Simon Rex) who hopes to break back into the business by cashing in on a 17-year-old donut shop employee named Strawberry (Suzanna Son).

They shot in Texas City, a town outside Houston known for petroleum-refining. Working through Covid, they sometimes shot without permits — local bureaucracy was stalled by the pandemic — and recruited people who had never been in a film before, including Brittney Rodriguez, who worked at a nearby refinery, and Ethan Darbone, who worked at a local restaurant. 

Baker had first met Son when he and his producing partner and wife, Samantha Quan, spotted her outside the Arclight Theater in Hollywood. Son had only lived in Los Angeles for nine days. (“This is a moment where I knew that person right there could be a star,” Baker told MovieMaker in 2022.)

Finding Mikey Madison and the Rest of the Anora Cast

Anora star Mikey Madison. Photographed by Christine Bartolucci for MovieMaker. All rights reserved. – Credit: C/O

For Anora, Baker and Quan looked to the big screen to cast their lead.

“I actually saw Once Upon a Time in Hollywood three times. I went back for a third screening of it just to see Mikey’s scene,” Baker recalls. “She stuck with me.”

The big scene was the one in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton stops Madison’s Manson family follower, Sadie, with a flamethrower. A few years later, Baker and Quan saw Madison’s character get burned alive in Scream. 

“I think it’s funny, but no more being lit on fire,” says Madison. “I think two times is one too many.”

It was during Scream, at the AMC Sunset 5 in Los Angeles, that Baker and Quan looked at each other and Baker said, “Mikey is our Ani, so we have to call her agent right after we leave the theater.” 

In a sign of what Baker considers “serendipity,” Madison turned out to have the same agent as The Florida Project’s Prince.

Soon Baker took Madison through preparation that included watching the 1972 Shun’ya Ito film Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion and explaining how Ani’s red scarf was inspired by the 1971 Jesus Franco film Vampyros Lesbos

Anora is set in Brooklyn’s Russian immigrant communities in parts of Coney Island, Brighton Beach and Sheepshead Bay. Blue-collar apartments and oddly opulent homes can occupy the same block.

One of the main settings of the film, Ivan’s mansion in Sheepshead Bay, “looks like a dentist’s office in a strange location,” notes Anora cinematographer Drew Daniels.

“It gave us the duality we were looking for. There’s Ani’s working-class world and then the romanticism of Ivan’s wealth,” says Daniels (who is also featured on page 21). “It has opulence and gross over-the-top consumerism.”

Ani speaks just enough Russian for her boss to steer her to Ivan.

Anora writer-director Sean Baker. Photographed by Christine Bartolucci for MovieMaker. All rights reserved. – Credit: C/O

Before Baker found the actor to play Ani’s client and paramour, he cast Yura Borisov as Igor, who does the oligarch’s dirty work and forms an unexpected bond with Ani. Borisov is perhaps best known for his work with director Juho Kuosmanen on Compartment Number 6, which won the Grand Prix at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. 

Baker found his Ivan when Borisov recommended Eydelshteyn, with whom he had starred in the Russian teen sci-fi film Guest From the Future, released earlier this year. 

Eydelshteyn, a director as well as actor, self-taped an audition for Baker. And opted to do it nude.

“I don’t like to lie in any way in my work because I think the work of an actor is to be honest,” says Eydelshteyn. “When I realized that Ivan owned Gucci and Balenciaga clothes, I thought, ‘Okay, what can I do? I don’t want to lie. I don’t want to say that this hoodie is Balenciaga.’ 

“Then I thought, ‘Maybe Ivan can be naked.’ There are lots of sex scenes in Anora, so the self-tape can be after sex, and if I’m naked, I will not be lying to Sean. … It will be Ivan, just without clothes and it will be honest to him, and because of it, I was naked. It’s a weird logic, I know.”

Borisov sees the nude self-tape as Eydelshteyn’s way to “demonstrate his willingness to do anything, including sex scenes. As an actor, Mark likes experiments and is eager to dive into them headlong.”

Eydelshteyn is similarly impressed by Borisov’s commitment. On Guest From the Future, he recalls, Borisov “shocked me. He said his character doesn’t blink because he’s an alien. His way of working is masterful because he thinks like a kid. The first thing he tries to do is create something interesting for himself.”

Madison says Eydelshteyn and Borisov are among the most talented actors she’s worked with.

“The first day working with both of them just blew my mind because they’re the kindest people, so excited, and came with so many ideas,” she says. “I was like, ‘Okay, I see you guys. I know what you’re bringing to the film.’”

Borisov says he connected so deeply with Madison as actors that they didn’t need to discuss some scenes in advance. 

“Mikey combines tactfulness, sensitivity and professionalism with a kind of daring and total involvement with the character,” he says. “We could just turn on the camera and shoot, finding ourselves each in the skin of a character.”

She notes that he was so plugged into his character that she realized on the last day of shooting:  “I have no idea who Yura is.”

“We were saying goodbye and we were in his apartment and he comes out of his bedroom wearing this really big skater T-shirt, basketball shorts, and a hat kind of cocked to the side,” she says. “I’d never seen him out of his character’s costume because he wore it every single day, and I thought, that’s just a testament to who Yura is as an actor, to so seamlessly integrate his personal creative process with the whole filming experience for everybody.”

Sex Shots, Not Sex Scenes

Mark Eydelshteyn and Mikey Madison in Anora, directed by Sean Baker. NEON – Credit: C/O

Though Anora involves a passionate, whirlwind, sex-filled romance, Baker stresses that he doesn’t like sex “scenes.” 

“They’re not sex scenes, they’re sex shots. And they’re very calculated,” he explains.

The director has never used intimacy coordinators, which started to become more common in Hollywood somewhere between The Florida Project and Red Rocket. He says he has taken care to be sensitive and attuned to his actors from the start, especially given the subject matter of his films.

Still, he did offer Madison and Eydelshteyn the use of intimacy coordinators — and they declined. One benefit of being spouses who make movies together is that Baker and Quan could coordinate the intimate scenes together, in consultation with their stars. 

“Sean, Sammy, and I had already created such a comfortable relationship, and I felt more comfortable having it be just them as opposed to bringing another person in the room. I think that was the best choice for this specific film and project,” Madison says. “We shot those scenes super quickly and the communication was definitely on point.”

Baker says the decision of whether to hire an intimacy coordinator should be made “on a film-by-film basis.” The one situation in which he would definitely want to use one, he says, would be a scene depicting sexual violence. 

“But so far as a writer I’ve never had the desire to write a scene like that,” he adds.

Baker has now told enough sex/work stories that it’s getting easy to gather make-or-break details.

“If you want to tell real-life stories, you’ve got to get out there, you’ve got to embed yourself,” he says. “I’ve been really lucky because now that I’ve made a certain number of films about the subject, I have sex workers come my way.”

Anora arrives in theaters October 18, from NEON.

Main image: Mikey Madison and Sean Baker. Photographed by Christine Bartolucci for MovieMaker. All rights reserved.

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