Mikey Madison On Being Cast In Sean Baker’s Mysterious Competition Title ‘Anora’: “I Was Floored” — Ones To Watch
18.05.2024 - 13:31
/ deadline.com
Mikey Madison says the call from Sean Baker came entirely out of the blue. “I guess he’d seen a horror film I did, Scream [2022], on the opening weekend, and decided to call my agent the very next day. I met him and Samantha Quan, his producing partner, for coffee, and they pitched me this amazing, crazy idea he had for a film. I was floored that he wanted to do this film with me, but I didn’t question it. I was like, ‘Yes, absolutely!’”
They worked on the project for a year before shooting started. Madison, however, is reluctant to spoil the surprise. “What I will say is that it’s different than any character I’ve ever played before, in every single way. It was definitely the most preparation, physically and emotionally I’ve ever done for a character, because Sean likes to mix professional actors with newcomers, and I wanted to be so confident and sure of who I was that I would fit into that environment in an honest and truthful way.”
Fitting in meant building the character from the inside out. “My character is from New York, so I wanted to be authentic from the area that my character was living in,” she says. “Sean is also from New York too, and I knew that he was going to be very specific in how he wanted me to sound. I worked with a dialect coach, and then I got to New York early before filming so that I could meet lots of women from the same area that my character was from, talk to them, take little pieces of their voices and meld it with what my vision was for how she would speak. I’m a California girl, so I have that upward inflection that people in New York don’t have, so it was important for me to make it really authentic that my character was born and raised in this one place.”
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