Mikey Madison Made ‘Pretty Gnarly’ Sacrifices to Change How She Looked in Anora
Mikey Madison’s character of Ani in Anora, which just earned her an Academy Award for Best Leading Actress at the 97th Annual Academy Awards, is one of those life-changing roles. In the film, Madison plays a sex worker who marries the son of a Russian oligarch and finds that his family doesn’t approve of their union. It’s a little bit of Cinderella with a dark twist, and it was enough for Oscar voters to reward her.
Madison, whose full name is Mikaela Madison Rosberg, first rose to fame for the role of a sullen teenager in the FX comedy Better Things. She also appeared in the Quentin Tarantino movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and in the fifth Scream movie. But it is perhaps fair to say not many people expected Madison’s rise to fame with Anora, or her Oscars win.
As more people have watched the movie, there have been many questions about Mikey Madison herself, particularly her ethnicity. But where is Mikey Madison from? Is she actually Russian in real life, like her character in Anora? What is her ethnicity? We break it down.
What’s Mikey Madison’s Ethnicity?
Madison is Jewish. The actress is said to have Polish, Lithuanian, and Russian Jewish roots, though she is by nationality American, born in Los Angeles. The actress herself has talked about her ethnicity, particularly when recalling a fun story about a screen test for Anora. She told Allure, “We had done a screen test in Los Angeles, and it was raining and I had straightened my hair. And then once moisture hit my hair it just went like, sshooo! Got really curly, frizzy. And Sean was like ‘Oh no, what’s happening to your hair?’”
To which Madison only replied. “I was like, ‘I’m Jewish.’ Like, I don’t know what you mean?”
Just like with a lot of ethnicities, there isn’t one version of Jewish hair and Jewish people do not all have dark and curly locks. However, Madison does have a version of Jewish hair that is pretty common.
Later in the interview, she went on to explain that Baker, who won Best Director for Anora, wanted the character to have straight hair, so she got her hair chemically straightened, something Madison described as “pretty gnarly.”
Madison has spoken about being Jewish before, sharing on the Happy Sad Confused podcast late last year that, “I would always say growing up I was a proud non-practicing Jew,” explaining that she did not attend Hebrew school and never became bat mitzvah – “but I wish I was.”
The actress also shared that her dad had a “big bar mitzvah” in Israel “but for some reason, we didn’t do it”. And though she wasn’t raised as an observant Jew, Madison described herself as a very “spiritual person”.
