Mikey Madison’s favourite Jack Nicholson performance: “Those are characters I am drawn to”
Mikey Madison has enjoyed quite an impressive rise to fame over the past decade, becoming one of the youngest ‘Best Actress’ winners at the Oscars after taking home the prize for Anora at the age of 25. Her performance came after only a few previous film and television roles, but with each she demonstrated her rather unforgettable screen presence, allowing her to quickly climb the industry’s ranks.
Madison was first seen on screens as the eldest daughter of Pamela Adlon’s Sam in Better Things, the award-winning FX comedy-drama series. Her first film role in the low-budget Liza, Liza, Skies Are Grey came in 2017, but it wasn’t until 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood that the actor really began to make a dent in the world of cinema. Playing a member of the Manson Family that reaches a very brutal demise, Madison was subsequently cast as a major character in 2022’s Scream, proving her versatility as an actor.
While Madison has only appeared in a small handful of productions during her career, she has frequently been drawn to challenging characters. With Sean Baker’s Anora, playing a sex worker who impulsively marries a Russian oligarch’s son, Madison’s character is one that, for the most part, audiences root for – but there are times she acts in flawed ways, as humans actually do.
For Madison, playing characters that are complex and real is one of the things she loves most about acting. For her role in Scream, she was required to play a character that could potentially be Ghostface, a ruthless killer targeting the friend group she is a part of, and Madison did a great job of keeping audiences guessing whether she was guilty or not.
Thus, she has found herself drawn to characters that aren’t strictly good or evil, picking out a certain Jack Nicholson performance as one of her all-time favourites for this very reason. Appearing in the Criterion Closet, Madison picked out Five Easy Pieces, stating, “Such a classic”. Directed by Bob Rafelson, the film follows Nicholson’s Bobby, who was raised in a well-off household as a piano prodigy only to grow up and lead a working-class life on an oil rig. He must confront his past when he goes back home to visit his dying father, resulting in one of the actor’s most profound performances.
The actor earned an Oscar nomination for his role, one that Madison calls “my favourite Nicholson performance.” She explained, “There is just something about how he approaches this character, such a morally grey character, yet you’re rooting for him.”
For Madison, “Those are often characters that I am drawn to as an actor. You know, nobody is just good or bad, it’s that sort of weird space in between that is really interesting to me.”
The movie also earned Karen Black a ‘Best Supporting Actress’ nomination, while it was in the running for ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Original Screenplay’, too. It was largely beaten by Patton, which won all of the aforementioned categories apart from ‘Best Supporting Actress’, which went to Helen Hayes for Airport. Five Easy Pieces might have missed out on Academy Award acclaim, but it remains a classic piece of Hollywood cinema that has inspired many actors, like Madison.
