Madison’s parents are both psychologists. She brought her father to one film event, where she says he diagnosed the characters in various movies (although he hasn’t shared where exactly in the DSM he’d place Anora). His passions include woodworking and photography, and Madison calls him “an artist trapped in a psychologist’s body”. He made a lot of the family’s furniture.
While her folks take a clinical approach to emotions, Madison’s is generally more visceral. “I think a lot of the way that I work is quite intuitive,” she says. “Sometimes I’ll sort of be breaking things down and really dissecting a character and their psychology, why they do things, and sometimes I just feel it.”
Madison is nothing like Anora, aside from a shared fondness for long, manicured nails. “I think people expect something, and then when they get me, I wonder if people are disappointed,” she says. “But I can’t be anyone other than myself, right?” She’s drawn to playing extreme characters precisely because it allows her to explore. “If I play these characters, then I’m going to get to experience so much life and living through them. And it doesn’t have to be me, you know? I get to have a safety net.”
There’s an intensity to her work that couldn’t be more different from her calm, peaceful energy in real life. Sean Baker remembers his surprise at meeting the shy, soft-spoken Madison after seeing her passionate performances. “She’s a listener more than a talker,” he says. But that power you see onscreen in her acting roles is clearly lurking somewhere just under the surface.
To prepare Madison for her role in Anora, Baker bought her a Blu-ray player and started sending her movies to watch, like Maurice Pialat’s Loulou—particularly for the lead performance by Isabelle Huppert—and À Nos Amours. He also sent over a bunch of sexploitation movies, including the 1972 Japanese women’s-prison revenge drama Female Prisoner Number #701: Scorpion, which Madison says she didn’t quite understand the purpose of at first, other than that Baker just really loves the genre. “But then there would be something that would click, and I’d be like, ‘Oh! He wants me to see this, or collect the energy from this character,’” she tells me. Baker says he wanted her to watch Scorpion for the scene where Anora leaves her rich beau’s mansion in her fur coat. Madison says sharing these highly specific tonal recommendations with Baker helped her understand the type of vividly colorful, high-impact but unpretentious movie he wanted them to make together.
