Anora, the latest comedy-drama from director Sean Baker, stars Once Upon a Time in Hollywood's Mikey Madison as Ani, a stripper and escort from the Brighton Beach neighborhood of New York City who finds herself caught up in a whirlwind romance – and marriage – with Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) a Russian oligarch's son.
Over the past 12 years, Baker's movies, Starlet, Tangerine, The Florida Project, and Red Rocket, have all dealt with different aspects of the sex industry, from adult film stars to trans sex workers, and he returns to the same themes of labor, class, and exploitation in Anora. "There are so many aspects of sex work, and sex work is really an umbrella term for many different occupations in that world," Baker tells 12DOVE on the red carpet at London Film Festival.
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"So I realized, upon getting to meet sex workers, becoming friends with sex workers, and hearing their stories, that there were a million stories to be told in this world," "It's not like I set out to make one after another. I never wanted it to be a shtick, but I found constant inspiration."
Madison tells us that 2015's Tangerine, shot entirely on an iPhone, has always been one of her favorite films, long before she met Baker, and praises him for being "a real actors' director." "He's very sensitive, kind, was very willing to let me express myself through this character, and wanted to hear all of my ideas, and just gave me a lot of creative freedom in terms of bringing her to life," she says.
Baker's new film gave him a chance to delve into a new part of the sex industry. "Anora is the escort-slash-dancer world, so there's a whole new wave of gentlemen's clubs that I discovered through my research, and that's a lap dance club," he explains. "It harkens back to what they called 'dime-a-dances' in World War 1, where soldiers would come into a city and go to a place and literally pay a dime to dance with somebody. This is the 2024 version of that, and I found it fascinating, and I don't think it's been covered much in film and TV, so that was our goal."
Anora is anchored by Madison's dynamic performance as the headstrong but vulnerable Ani, and Baker decided to cast her after seeing her in 2022's Scream. While Woodsboro teen Amber is a very different role, the horror-comedy prepared Madison for her part in Anora in other ways. "Ani is a very different character from anyone I've played, but I think that the stunt training that I was able to do in preparation for Scream definitely helped me doing my own stunts for Anora," she tells 12DOVE.
"The physicality of the character, it was the most challenging thing I've ever had to do, honestly. Not even really the fighting," she adds, referring to a scrap between Ani and some of Vanya's father's henchmen in the movie's second act that veers between farcical and disturbing. "It was just learning how to dance and learning pole tricks. It was unbelievably difficult."
Like Baker's other work, Anora is full of comedic beats and larger-than-life characters, but the film also emphasizes the repetitive, labor-intensive nature of sex work – at the end of the day, being an escort is a job, just like any other. "The unfair stigma applied to sex work has not gone away," Baker tells us. "My hope is that continuing to make these stories is helping to chip away at that stigma."
Anora is out now in UK cinemas. For more on what to watch, check out the rest of our Big Screen Spotlight series.
