Baftas 2025: Mikey Madison dedicates ‘Best Leading Actress’ win to sex workers
Mikey Madison has won the Bafta for ‘Best Leading Actress’ for her role in Sean Baker’s romantic drama Anora.
She faced stiff competition from the likes of Demi Moore for Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance and Marianne Jean-Baptiste for Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths. At just 25, Madison was the youngest nominee and was also nominated for the ‘Rising Star’ award.
Her win is something of an upset, as Moore has so far dominated most of the awards circuit. Anora has been largely shut out of the Baftas so far, having lost out on ‘Best Director’ to The Brutalist’s Brady Corbet and ‘Best Original Screenplay’ to Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain.
In her acceptance speech, Madison joked that she should have listened to her publicist and prepared something. “Thank you so much Sean Baker,” she said. “I just adore you. You are such an incredible person. I know you hate it when I praise you but I just have to, you made my dreams come true.”
After thanking her mother and her fellow nominees, Madison said, “I want to take a moment to recognise the sex worker community. I want to say that I see you; you deserve respect and human decency – I will always be a friend and ally, and I implore others to do the same.”
Anora centres on a sex worker (Madison) who falls in love with the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch and marries him during a whirlwind romance.
In Far Out’s four-star review, Emily Ruuskanen wrote, “Baker has created a shattering odyssey of love in a modern world, a film that feels more urgent than his others in the way he chooses to end it, exposing a society that has been corrupted by materialism and our misogynistic dating standards.”
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