Mikey Madison and Sean Baker talk 'complex' “Anora” ending and her most surprising costar
"We’re dealing with some complex relationships, especially at the end," director Sean Baker tells "Entertainment Weekly."
Warning: This article contains spoilers for Anora.
Before Anora, director Sean Baker would usually cast a minimal amount of professional actors in his movies. In The Florida Project (2017), for instance, he cast Willem Dafoe alongside newcomers like young Brooklynn Prince. In Red Rocket (2021), he surrounded Simon Rex with first-time actors, many of whom Baker asked to audition after running into them on the street near the filming locations.
But Mikey Madison is far from the only experienced actor in Anora, which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year and is now shaping up as a possible Best Picture contender at the Oscars. Part of the reason for the different casting is that the COVID-19 safety protocols that were in place during the production of Red Rocket (which made it hard to transport a large cast across state lines) are no longer as restrictive. But the casting choices are also a product of the story that Anora is telling, about a Brooklyn sex worker who falls into a whirlwind romance with the son of a Russian oligarch.
“This is my first film in which almost all the leads and the supporting actors are all seasoned, trained actors,” Baker tells Entertainment Weekly. “There was budget, and there was time, which are always the biggest factors. Plus, a significant percentage of our dialogue is in Russian and Armenian, and I don’t know those languages. So that was another reason why I really had to have seasoned actors on board.”
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Baker continues, “In the past, when I've worked with first-timers that I grab off the street, that's an amazing experience, but it wouldn't really work for this film. This film was, as you can probably tell, tightly scripted from beginning to end.”
But even within that tight script, these seasoned actors could make suggestions that impressed Baker. For instance, Yura Borisov (who plays Igor, one of the Russian henchmen employed by the oligarch to fix this marriage situation) came up with an idea during the film’s epic fight scene that the director loved.
“All great actors will bring something to the table that you never expected ever,” Baker says. “When Yura is doing that screaming in her face, ‘Stop screaming!’, he understood my sensibility enough where he pitched that to me. He was like, ‘I want to just scream to the point that it takes to the next level, and I'm screaming louder than she's screaming.’ I'm like, ‘You're so right. That would really help in this moment and take it to a very unexpected place.’ These wonderful actors would bring this stuff to the table, pitch it to me, and then we could figure out how to work it in.”
Baker wasn’t the only one who was impressed by Borisov. As the film goes on and Ani’s relationship with Vanya (Mark Eidelstein) starts to sour, she ends up forging an unexpected connection with Igor. The characters’ chemistry developed in parallel with the actors’ working relationship.
“Yura is an incredible, really serious, professionally trained actor in the Russian Stanislavsky school,” Madison says. “Working with him was really different, he’s so soulful and sensitive. He was constantly surprising me with the way that he was approaching his character, which I think in turn made me feel differently about him, as Ani feels differently about Igor.”
By the end of Anora, it almost seems like the title character may have actually found a possibility for true love with Igor, who seems to genuinely care about her more than Vanya. But there’s also a lot of bitterness and disappointment to go around, and the final emotions are complicated and ambiguous. That’s another benefit of working with seasoned actors like Borisov, who previously earned acclaim for his performance in 2021’s Compartment No. 6.
Related: Cannes-winning Anora director on mashing genres: 'I love tonal jumps. I love roller coasters.'
“It was so great to have Mikey, Mark, and Yura really get into the development of their characters and understand why things are happening,” Baker says. “We’re dealing with some complex relationships, especially at the end with Ani’s gravitation towards Igor. That stuff was discussed a lot, like what’s going on in Ani’s head in that ending scene? It was great to have actors who were so invested because they wanted to discuss this.”
Anora is in theaters now.