Mikey Madison on acting lessons from Leonardo DiCaprio: “It definitely made an impression on me”
When Sean Baker’s Anora was released in 2024, it transformed Mikey Madison into a star seemingly overnight. Playing the lead character, a stripper from Brooklyn who impulsively marries the son of a Russian oligarch, she dazzled audiences with her wit, charm, and vulnerability. That goodwill took her all the way to the Oscars, where she won the ‘Best Actress’ award in the biggest upset of the night. She is now poised to become one of Hollywood’s biggest stars at the tender age of 25.
Although she appeared to burst onto the scene out of nowhere, Madison has been acting for over a decade, and you’ve probably already seen her in a pre-Anora role. She had a recurring part on Pamela Adlon’s FX series Better Things between 2016 and 2022 and had a role in the 2022 Scream reboot. However, the film that many people may not realise they saw her in is Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
It’s hard to keep track of the number of future stars that appeared in the film. Sidney Sweeney, Margaret Qualley, and Maya Hawke all played members of Charles Manson’s infamous Family, but Madison held down a particularly memorable and gruesome one. Sadie is one of the most bloodthirsty members of the group who breaks into Brad Pitt’s house and tries to murder him. In the ensuing fight, she is stabbed in the face, mauled by a dog, and lit on fire, and Madison’s blood-curdling screams provide a chilling soundtrack. They might even have been one of the key factors in her successful bid to win the part of Anora.
However, she doesn’t spend all her screen time in a violent, bloody scrum. In one scene, she and other members of the Manson Family are in a car when they encounter Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, a neurotic, ageing television star named Rick Dalton. Sitting outside the star’s house in their idling car, the group is accosted by Dalton, who shouts at them to get out of his neighbourhood.
Madison was sitting in the backseat of the car and didn’t have much acting to do in the scene, but she was taking it all in, nevertheless, and learned a valuable lesson from observing DiCaprio. In an interview with GQ, she remembered, “Every scene was new and different. He was trying things; he was exploring his character. He didn’t take it too seriously, I mean, in the sense of, if something got fucked up.”
Some directors don’t want any variation. They simply want the actors to do take after take exactly as the scene is written until the director gets what they want. Others prefer to move quickly and only do one or two takes. However, seeing someone as famous as DiCaprio be free and flexible in his performance was an informative experience for Madison, who was only 19 when the movie was filmed.
“I was so young at the time. I think it definitely made an impression on me,” she concluded. Whether or not her observations of DiCaprio informed her performance in Anora, it is worth noting that she now has exactly the same number of Oscars as he does.
