Jason Isaacs Just Addressed His Controversial Comments About Seeing Mikey Madison’s Vulva ‘All the Time’ in Anora
Mikey Madison won an Academy Award for her role in Anora, and anyone who watched the film knows that Madison played a sex worker, so a lot of nudity was expected. But in Hollywood, seeing nudity doesn’t mean there is always real nudity. There are numerous tricks and prosthetics involved in the nudity we see onscreen that means actors don’t actually have to get nude for us to see nudity these days.
And even when there is nudity, there’s the work of intimacy coordinators, and what it means to be nude on set has—thankfully changed a lot from when sets used to feel like really unsafe places for a lot of actors years ago.
But the fact that Anora is a film about sex workers has raised a lot of questions about Mikey Madison, how comfortable she was on set, and whether she was actually nude during her nude scenes in the film. This is especially true after actor Jason Isaacs brought up Madison after he was asked about whether he wore a prosthetic penis for his nude scene during The White Lotus and he complained there was a “double standard” and Mikey Madison or The Substance star Margaret Qualley would never get asked the same question. “And it’s interesting because the best actress this year is Mikey Madison at the Oscars,” the actor explained. “And I don’t see anybody discussing her vulva, which was on [the screen] all the time.”
Isaacs recently clarified his comments, telling Variety, “I said the wrong words in the wrong way. I used the phrase ‘double standard,’ which I didn’t mean at all. There is a [different] double standard — women have been monstrously exploited and men haven’t.”
Was Mikey Madison really nude in Anora? Here’s what she said about it and about her experience filming the movie.
Was Mikey Madison really nude in Anora?
Yes, Mikey Madison really did film nude scenes for Anora. “I was always comfortable, and I also think because Ani was too,” Madison said in an interview with The New York Times. “To me, it was never a thought in my head to be nervous or anything.”
“I just saw these actors having these deep, emotional intimate connections or experiences on film, and it was so moving and meaningful to me, and I thought that looks fun or that looks like a safe place to explore all of those things without having to do it in real life,” she added.
The film also did not have an intimacy coordinator, according to director Sean Baker, who told the Associated Press that intimacy coordinators should be used on a “case-by-case” basis, but he did not do so for “Anora” because all the actors were comfortable with him guiding the process.
Madison confirmed this to Pamela Anderson during an Actors on Actors video conversation for Variety. “For our film, it was a choice that I made; the filmmakers offered me, if I wanted, an intimacy coordinator. Mark Eydelshteyn, who plays Ivan, and I decided it would be best to just keep it small. My character is a sex worker, and I had seen Sean’s films and know his dedication to authenticity. I was ready for it. As an actress, I approached it as a job.”
She also spoke about the physicality of the job during Actors on Actors, saying, “I started working on the physicality of the character, because she’s a dancer. I did quite a bit of pole training and I did this stripper boot camp where I was taught how to give lap dances and how to twerk, which is such an important part of strip club culture and is something I didn’t know how to do.”
