In Sean Baker’s film Anora, Mikey Madison lets out a scream so loud, so funny, and yet so terrifyingly guttural that it evokes the 25-year-old’s many already iconic screen shrieks—most poignantly as Pamela Adlon’s yearning teenage daughter in the lauded FX series Better Things. Most climatically in the finale of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (when her Manson killer is torched by Leonardo DiCaprio’s flamethrower in a pool). And most fittingly in Scream, delivering on her big death scene. Her range across these projects may have a common pitch, but otherwise, the characters—and portrayals—couldn’t be more different.

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Baker (Red Rocket, The Florida Project) has handed Madison her first adult lead role in Anora, and the performance is revelatory—fearless in its jagged humanity and piercing in its emotional layers. The film’s wrenching last scene adds profound context to everything that came before. “She just showed a wide range—that she could get crazy, but also really funny, with lots of attitude,” Baker says of what drew him to Madison. He wrote Anora specifically for her. The character, a sex worker in Brooklyn who impulsively marries a Russian billionaire’s 21-year-old son, Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), marks a natural extension of Baker’s cinematic subjects—those operating on the rougher edges of American life, scraping by for a marginally better tomorrow. Anora—or Ani, as she prefers to go by—fits into this lineage. Madison’s unsentimental, sharply comic approach to the role seems like a match made in Baker heaven.

“I quickly learned that she’s an awesome cinephile with very similar tastes, and so it was really meant to be,” Baker says. “I mean, her favorite film is Possession. I have a huge poster of Possession on my wall.”

We’re sitting on a Croisette terrace in Cannes, the afternoon after Anora’s sensational Cannes Film Festival 2024 premiere. Madison sits beside Baker, admittedly a little overwhelmed after many hours of adoring attention and photographs and sound bites. As she chimes in, you see that shared sensibility in action. “I have a poster as well,” she assures. Then Baker: “She gave me a Candy poster recently. What is that from, 1970?” Madison doesn’t skip a beat: “No, ’68. ’68, yeah.”

Such creative alignment drove Anora and their collaboration. “It was required for this sort of movie because we’re going to places that wouldn’t be expected by mainstream Hollywood,” Baker says. “She knew my style.”

Madison had never been offered a role without auditioning until Anora. The minute she left her first meeting with Baker, she couldn’t get Ani out of her head. She worked intensively with a dialect coach, refining a thick Coney Island accent. She read books that Baker loaned her on sex work. She completed extensive dance training, crucial for Ani’s scenes in the club where she performs for men, but also for Madison to key into her overall physicality. “It really affected the way that I moved, the way that I walked, the way that I felt,” she tells me. “I talked to multiple consultants, sex workers, read memoirs, anything that I could do. I went to strip clubs and watched women in Los Angeles.” She stops herself with a slight smile. “That sounds creepy.”

Baker shakes his head. “The preparation was incredible,” he says. She responds, “I wanted to completely know this character; obviously to have room to discover more, but without any question that could be left unanswered by myself as an actor.” And yet she remained an incredibly present acting partner. Eydelshteyn came into Anora nervous: He’d auditioned in English for the first time, and occasionally struggled with the dynamic between Ivan and Ani. “She was always helping me and asking me: ‘Is it comfortable for you? Is it okay for you? How can I help you?’” Eydelshteyn says. “From our first meeting it was like, ‘Okay, we are scared together.’”

For the movie’s first scene, an immersion into a standard night for Ani in the strip club, Baker ran cameras live for 10 minutes and asked Madison to mingle with Ani’s colleagues and clients in the scene without saying any specific dialogue. She improvised expertly, but more importantly, wove in expositional details without missing a beat. “The mechanics of what it’s like to be a lap dancer—she knew it so well that she was able to give me all of that information that was needed without it [being] scripted,” Baker says. This was especially important since the director came into Anora hoping to “remove the stigma” around sex work, with plans to continue covering the subject in future films.

Another bravura scene—the movie’s turning point, really—comes later, as the reality of Ani and Ivan’s marriage abruptly comes into focus. Ivan runs away, realizing he’s in over his head when his father’s Russian-Armenian employees show up to undo the union—leaving Ani under their bumbling supervision. Eydelshteyn plays the scene with a hilarious, sudden skittishness. “It’s a funny role like this because it’s [Mark],” says Yura Borisov, who plays Igor, the nicest of the fixer crew. Borisov had just made another film with Eydelshteyn when he was cast in Anora, and recommended him for the part. “That’s why me and Mark are here now, thanks to Cannes,” he says with a laugh. “And here we are again.”

With Ivan gone, the scene focuses on Ani’s predicament as Igor, his associate Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan), and their boss Toros (Karren Karagulian) try to restrain her—calmly. That does not go well. Ani fights and smashes, and yes, screams for help. Madison goes gloriously unleashed.

At one point, she kicks Garnick through a glass table. Ivan’s mansion is promptly trashed. “Sean texted me the night before they shot the fight—he said, ‘It’s a different [scene] now, it’s a little bit more violent,’” says Karagulian, a longtime Baker collaborator. “I was very nervous because there were 11 pages of dialogue for me: ‘How am I going to do this?’ Then [Baker] said, ‘I’m changing things.’” You feel that liveness in the scene’s escalating, screwball-coded tension. “He’s redoing everything and it’s happening in the moment,” says Tovmasyan. “It’s like he’s painting it.”

Borisov, Karagulian, and Tovmasyan ratchet up the comedy even as they’re working—improvising, in fact—between Russian, Armenian, and English. “Especially when we say something in Russian or Armenian. I hope [audiences] felt the humor,” Karagulian says. Baker credits much of that energy to what they found on the day. When Garnick gets brutally table-smashed, for instance, Baker and Madison knew the perfect punch line and said it to each other at the same time (no spoilers here!). And while they were using a stunt coordinator, the cast was committed to playing out their own stunts. It took over a week to film.

“It had to be very calculated and choreographed,” Baker says. But it evolved so much on the day, says Madison, because “we just didn’t expect how real it would feel. It’s written on a page, and we’re walking through it, but then Garnick is actually chasing me and dragging me. I’m fighting with all my strength—it’s very intense to do something like that.”

“And quite disturbing to hear that bone-chilling scream echo through the house,” Baker adds.

Neon is set to release Anora later this year, and based on the rapturous reviews, an awards campaign feels likely. The first test will be whether it picks up anything at this weekend’s prize ceremony in Cannes. “Playing in competition, seriously, it’s just like having a dream come true twice,” Baker says, referencing Anora coming on the heels of Red Rocket’s own competition launch.

Madison had seen Baker’s Tangerine five times coming into Anora. She’d completed multiple viewings of his other features, The Florida Project and Red Rocket, too. She felt the enormity of the project and ran with it. That much is evident onscreen. On the last day of filming, when all was said and done, “I was very sad,” she says. “It felt like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And I don’t know how many more relationships I’ll have with a director like that. I just didn’t want it to end.”

Baker warmly disagrees once more, expressing hope they’ll work together again. But either way, he sees a bright future ahead. “She’s going to have a million opportunities with incredible directors, incredible experiences,” Baker says. “I know that now.”