Mikey Madison Is the Villain Next Door
Mikey Madison doesn’t seem like she would be the bad guy. Within the first thirty seconds of our Zoom call, she’s picking up her laptop and carrying it across the room, angling her screen downward to show off her new puppy dozing on the floor of his playpen.
“Can you see him? His name is Jam, because I have a cat named Biscuit.”
Like I said—not very villainous. Madison, off camera, is the type to set up pee pads for her puppy and schedule his training classes. The twenty-five-year-old bakes banana muffins and is forever updating a running Google Doc of actors and directors she hopes to work with one day. Her warm personality and wide smile could make her a Disney Channel darling. But that’s not her speed.
Instead, time and time again, Madison takes on roles as a maniac, a psychopath, a murderer. Most recently she played a luckless stripper from New York who becomes entangled with the son of a Russian oligarch in the subversive not-quite-rom-com Anora, which was a sensation at Cannes earlier this year. That followed roles as a fanatical Manson-cult follower in Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood and as the Ghostface killer in Scream.
“I don't know how I got into a pocket of playing antagonistic characters, but I did. It’s fun,” Madison says. “I’m a good girl, really, and I’ve always been a good girl. I’ve never broken the rules or done bad things, and it’s so interesting to play characters who have, because I feel like I’ve been able to experience it with this safety net underneath me.”
Madison insists that she’s “risk averse,” and I’m sure that’s true when it comes to things like going bungee jumping or driving over the speed limit. But when it comes to her career, she’s been fearless about making bold choices from the start.
The first big decision was to pick acting over horses. “My grandmother was a horseback rider, and my mom was a horseback rider, and so, naturally, I was riding horses before I could walk—or at least sitting on a horse,” she says. As a teen, she was homeschooled so she could spend more time with the horses. The barn was a second home. She could have literally ridden off into the sunset that way. But there was a tickle in her subconscious—a “yearning” for human connection pushing her to try something different.
“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,” she says. “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.”
Both of Madison’s parents are psychologists; she had no connections in the film industry, no friends who had gone into acting. All she had was a gut feeling and a love of classics that she’d inherited from her dad—like Bond films, Marilyn Monroe’s filmography, and, of course, a healthy portion of Quentin Tarantino. Her leap of faith paid off spectacularly. At just 19, Madison was cast in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.
“When I finally gave myself permission to fail or to embarrass myself or to not be perfect is when things started happening for me,” she says. Only after she allowed herself to “make a fool” of herself in auditions did the roles she truly wanted start coming in.
Director Sean Baker saw her in Scream on its opening weekend in 2022, and a few days later he called Madison to meet for coffee. He had a proposition: If she agreed to star in Anora, he would start writing the script for her then and there.
It was the first time she hadn’t had to audition and only the second time she’d accepted a part without laying eyes on the script. But there was that gut feeling again. It was a risk, but it barely seemed like one to Madison. Her collaboration with Baker felt “written in the stars.” She worked with Baker to mold the character, did her own stunts on set, took pole-dancing classes and Russian lessons, and visited strip clubs.
All that work paid off in a big way when Anora won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May. She and Baker were rewarded for the heart, the soul, and the energy that went into making the film. But there was something else that the experience gave Madison. It was the metamorphosis of the actress herself.
“Right before I went into shooting Anora, I grew confidence—not as an actor but as a person,” she says. She’s always been an introvert. As a kid she sometimes felt so shy she had trouble looking people in the eye. Even her family was surprised that she would want to shift into such a public-facing industry, one where, even when you’re loud and brash and confident, it isn’t easy to be heard—much less when you’re a woman, much less when you’re young.
“I think that the kind of actor I am now, because of the experiences I’ve had, I’m confident in my voice and that what I have to say is important,” she says. “Even if someone doesn’t want to listen, I’m still going to share it and tell them. Because as an actor, I’m not a puppet. It’s really important that my voice is heard, because it’s a collaboration, you know?”
Collaboration. It’s the perfect word for her work with Baker. “It’s not a relationship I’ve ever had before,” she says of working with the director. “I think we were just really in tune with each other in terms of the comedy and where the character was going.… I think it changed the relationship, going into the film where we were willing to just try things and take risks.”
It’s something that every adrenaline junkie knows and many of the greatest actors have learned: Once you start taking those risks, it’s pretty damn hard to stop, to go back to a place where things feel easy and familiar. The goal now is different from when Madison started: “I constantly want to be in a place where I never get comfortable. I always want to be pushing myself to learn and become a better actor every day. I don’t think I’ll ever be comfortable enough to be like, Oh, I’ve made it.”
At home with Jam and Biscuit, Madison may still be risk averse. But in her work, she knows that risks aren’t just part of the process—they’re the whole point.
Photographed by Mark Seliger
Styled by Chloe Hartstein
Hair by Kevin Ryan using GO247 & UNITE
Grooming by Jessica Ortiz for La Mer
Makeup by Rebecca Restrepo using Lisa Eldridge Beauty
Production by Madi Overstreet and Ruth Levy
Set Design by Michael Sturgeon
Nails by Eri Handa using Dior
Tailoring by Yana Galbshtein
Design Director Rockwell Harwood
Contributing Visual Director James Morris
Executive Producer, Video Dorenna Newton
Executive Director, Entertainment Randi Peck
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