Mikey Madison is so refreshing as a young actor. She won the Best Actress Oscar in 2025 for Anora, and she managed to do so without ever becoming omnipresent or “too much.” She also disappeared after she won the Oscar – she didn’t take a victory lap, nor did she immediately sign on to a million commercial projects. She was probably offered dozens of scripts in 2025, but she quickly became very choosey. Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning became her first post-Oscar, post-Anora film, and Mikey covers the latest issue of Vogue to talk about the film and everything that’s happened to her in the past two years. She sounds enormously grounded for a 27-year-old who won the Best Actress Oscar at 25. You can read the full Vogue piece here. Some highlights:

The black sheep: As a child in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Woodland Hills, just north of the Santa Monica Mountains, she says she felt like “the black sheep” in her family. It was one thing that none of her siblings—a twin brother, a younger brother, and two older half sisters—shared her horsiness, nor had they elected to be homeschooled in the seventh grade, as she had (to do more riding). Quite another was the matter of her striking looks: She had raven hair and almond-shaped eyes in a house otherwise full of redheads. “I grew up with everyone assuming that my brothers were twins and that I was adopted,” Madison tells me, a fiction that delighted the boys—and that she herself sort of started to believe. (She eventually took a DNA test to put all that to bed.)

The daughter of two practicing psychologists: “I think people have this understanding that all of Los Angeles is Hollywood, but it’s really not. I grew up feeling completely separated and just totally unaware of any of that.”

She worked on Better Things for five seasons: It essentially taught Madison everything. “I learned how to be a professional person. I didn’t know anything about acting, about work, having a job.” She also did her first step-and-repeats, wearing to one premiere event a yellow dress that she bought at Goodwill for probably $8 with “a pair of Jessica Simpson heels.” In retrospect, she doesn’t think she looked half bad.

Her preparation for Anora: “Sean [Baker] sort of plucked me out and gave me this incredible opportunity and this amazing character who I couldn’t have been more different from. I wanted to do justice to the character, and I wanted to do justice to him.” There was a tendency among entertainment journalists to call her elaborate preparation for Anora “Method”—installing a stripper pole in her home, taking Russian lessons, doing her own stunts. But all she was trying to do was sell it. “I recently had a meeting with a director who was like, ‘I didn’t know that you were actually an actress.’ And that’s the kind of thing that’s important to me.”

She wants to help develop her roles: “Honestly, it took me so long to realize that I’m not just an actress for hire—that my voice is really important, and people care about my input. It’s still a learning process, because I also have this people-pleasing tendency of just: yes, yes, okay,” she says. But she also has ideas of her own. “There are things that don’t exist yet that I want to do.”

Winning big awards so early in her career: “I’m definitely more of an anxious-leaning person. I tend to be very practical, in terms of, keep your expectations low so you don’t hurt yourself…. I’ve always been like that. So I think that when it happened, it superseded every expectation I’d had for myself, ever.” Even the idea that she might not have to audition anymore was shocking. Madison articulates the same thing another way: “I still feel like this working actor who feels the need to prove themselves.”

She stays offline deliberately. “It feels kind of big and vast and stressful,” she says, referring, it seems, to the internet in general. Acting may have made her slightly less shy, but Madison still describes herself as “sensitive”—too nervous to read reviews (“I don’t think I ever did until Anora, but that was only after someone told me it was safe and I wouldn’t get my feelings hurt”) and certainly too delicate to confront a comments section.

She wants kids: “I have always dreamed of getting married and that kind of white-picket-fence situation. My sisters have it and my friends are getting married and thinking about having kids. It definitely makes me think about that a lot.”

[From Vogue]

I think we’re so used to actors and celebrities arriving with thirst and momagers in tow, we forget what it looks like when an actor comes from a happy, educated, middle-class family who supports them in the background. Like, it does not sound like Mikey’s siblings or parents want any part of Hollywood, but they’re just supportive, healthy, normal people who want Mikey to do well and work hard. I think it’s the lack of neediness that impresses me the most, and the intelligence to NOT spill her purse in interviews. She’s self-possessed, which is pretty rare.

Cover courtesy of Vogue, additional photos courtesy of Avalon Red.