You know what it’s like: you’ve ordered an important package, but you can’t be at home when it’s delivered so you ask a friend to take it in for you. So it was for Mikey Madison, except the item was a professional-grade dancer’s pole and the person she co-opted to help out was her father. “I was filming a different project,” says the 25-year-old American actor, “and I said, ‘Dad, can you please install this thing in my house?’ He was like, ‘Of course, sweetie.’ And I think it was good I asked him. He had kind of an idea what the film might be, so he was able to watch it and not be completely surprised.”
That film is Anora, in which Madison stars as an exotic dancer called Ani, a performance that’s already generating lots of talk of a best actress Oscar nomination. Ani is working in a Manhattan strip club one night when she is assigned to entertain the playboy son of an oligarch, Ivan, played by Mark Eidelstein (an actor sometimes described, enticingly, as “Russia’s Timothée Chalamet”). They hit it off and Ivan hires Ani for a week, drastically upending her life: she goes from living in a shared apartment, bickering about why there’s no milk in the fridge, to padding around a mansion with a lift, daily maid service and a cryotherapy chamber. In a fever dream of expensive booze and drugs, the new couple descend on Las Vegas where, almost inevitably, they get married in a chintzy chapel: “Fuck yeah, I do,” Ani tells the registrar.
