Mikey Madison has just won the BAFTA for Leading Actress for her breakthrough role in Anora, Sean Baker’s comedy-romance about a sex worker from Brooklyn who marries the son of a Russian oligarch.
Mikey’s performance has been generating buzz on the awards circuit, and the actress has been vocal about the challenges of preparing physically through pole fitness, too.
Putting hours into training was important because she wanted her character Anora to seem like ‘a very seasoned dancer’, she revealed to Indie Wire.
What she ‘never expected’, however, was ‘how much it hurts. It really burns your skin at first’, she reflected to Access Hollywood. ‘You don’t expect it to, because when you see these people dance it’s so sensual and effortless. [But] it doesn’t feel like that at all.
‘Yes, you have to build lots of upper-body strength and develop muscles in places you didn’t have before, but… the conditioning that goes along with the training… is one of the things that I never expected.
‘So it was a big undertaking to dedicate myself to accomplishing certain skills. I was very ambitious [and] I spent countless hours a day. It was physically one of the most challenging things I’ve ever had to do.’
‘It completely changed my body,’ she continued to Nashville Scene.
Mikey Madison's pole dancing almost didn't feature in Anora
Elaborating on The Graham Norton Show, she described seeing pole dancing in action: ‘The first time I went to a club, I was watching these women move and I thought, “It’s so effortless. I can do that. I can go upside down on a pole.” And I tried a class and it was the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do. I thought, “Oh, I’m screwed. I’m not sexy like that.”‘
Disappointingly, however, after five months of training, [the director] Sean picked a lap-dance club for a filming location that would involve no pole dancing.
She panicked. ‘[I’d] just destroyed my body learning how to do this,’ she recalled. So she convinced Sean to ‘let me have one scene in the film where I get to do some 10-second trick.’
Mikey was also new to other forms of dancing involved for her role. Speaking to Access Hollywood, she revealed, ‘I went into my twerk classes with very little knowledge and no expertise.’
In her acceptance speech, Mikey thanked her mum, her ‘favourite scene partner’ who ‘always helped me memorise my lines.’ She also showed her support for ‘the sex-worker community’, insisting they deserved ‘respect and human decency’.
This article originally appeared on Women’s Health U.K.
