Best Mikey Madison Movies After Anora

Mikey Madison’s performance in Anora is one of the best things to happen to American cinema in the last few years. Sean Baker’s film gave her the kind of role most actors wait a career for, and she didn’t just meet the moment. She owned it. The Palme d’Or win at Cannes, the avalanche of critical praise, the awards season buzz that’s still building toward next year’s Oscars. Anora turned Madison from a familiar face in genre work and indie TV into one of the most watched actors in Hollywood. So what do you do after a performance like that? You go looking for everything she’s done, that’s what. And while Madison’s filmography isn’t massive, what’s there tells a real story about an actor who was sharpening her skills in plain sight long before the rest of us caught on.

Here’s the honest reality of tracing Mikey Madison’s career: she doesn’t have a dozen lead roles waiting to be rediscovered. What she has is a handful of projects where she shows up with total commitment, even when the material doesn’t always match her talent. That fearlessness, the thing that made Anora’s third-act meltdown so devastating, was visible from the very beginning. If you’re hungry for more of her work after seeing Anora, here’s where to look and what to expect.

The Role That Built Her: Max Fox on Better Things

If you really want to understand Mikey Madison as a performer, the best place to start isn’t a movie. It’s the FX series Better Things, Pamela Adlon’s semi-autobiographical comedy about a working actress raising three daughters in Los Angeles. Madison plays Max, the oldest daughter, across all five seasons (2016-2022). That’s a significant chunk of time, and you can literally watch her grow up on screen.

What makes the role matter is that Max isn’t the easy kid. She’s the difficult one, the teenager who fights with her mother, makes bad choices, pushes boundaries, and slowly, painfully learns how to be an adult. Adlon’s show didn’t hand Madison neat character arcs or tidy resolutions. The messiness was the point. Madison had to play sullen and loving in the same episode, sometimes in the same scene, and she did it with a naturalism that felt uncomfortably real. If you’ve ever watched a family member go through their worst phase and still recognized the person you love underneath, that’s what Madison captures in Better Things. It’s the kind of long-form character work that teaches an actor things a single film never could, and you can draw a direct line from Max’s stubbornness and vulnerability to what Madison later brought to Anora.

Catching Fire in the Tarantino Sequence

Before Anora, Madison’s biggest big-screen moment came in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019). She plays one of the Manson Family members, and while it’s not a huge role in terms of screen time, she makes it count. The final sequence of that film, where Tarantino’s alternate history collides with the Manson home invasion, is one of the wildest stretches in any movie that decade. Madison is terrifying in it. There’s a ferocity to her performance that stands out even in a cast that includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, and Margot Robbie. You believe every second of it.

Tarantino has always had a knack for spotting talent early. Think about what he did for Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, Christoph Waltz. He didn’t discover Madison in the same way, but casting her in a role that required genuine menace showed he saw something others hadn’t tapped into yet. The Manson sequence works partly because of how committed Madison is to being absolutely unhinged. Going back to it after Anora, you start seeing the building blocks. That feral energy she channels into the Tarantino climax? She’d later redirect it into something completely different but equally raw for Baker’s film.

The Mask That Slips in Scream

Madison also appeared in Scream (2022), the legacy sequel that brought the franchise back with a new generation of Woodsboro residents. She plays Amber Freeman, and without spoiling the specifics for anyone who hasn’t caught up, her role becomes far more significant than you’d initially expect. She’s great at playing someone whose mask slips. There’s a specific skill to horror performances where you have to pivot from likeable to dangerous in a single beat, and Madison nails that transition completely.

What’s impressive is how much personality she packs into a part that could have been generic in lesser hands. The moment Amber stops pretending, Madison flips a switch. She goes from bubbly high schooler to something genuinely unhinged, and she does it without winking at the camera or playing it camp. She takes the genre seriously without taking herself too seriously, which is exactly the balance a good Scream movie needs. It’s a supporting role in an ensemble, but she walks away with some of the film’s most memorable moments. If you loved the way Madison can shift registers in Anora, going from charming to desperate to furious within a single conversation, Scream is where you see her first testing that gear.

What Made Anora Hit Different

Then there’s Anora itself, the performance that changed everything. Sean Baker cast Madison as a Brooklyn sex worker who marries the son of a Russian oligarch, and the result was one of the most electric performances of 2024. The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and Madison’s awards campaign has been the story of this past season, with the Academy Awards ceremony still ahead early next year.

What makes her work special is the range. She’s funny, she’s sexy, she’s heartbreaking, and she’s furious, sometimes all in the same scene. The extended sequence where Anora’s fairy tale starts crumbling around her is some of the best acting in any film from the last several years. Madison doesn’t just cry or yell. She fights. She physically, verbally, emotionally refuses to let go of what she thought she had. What Baker understood, and what other directors are clearly paying attention to now, is that Madison can carry a film entirely on her shoulders. She’s in nearly every frame of Anora, and she holds it all together. Go back and watch her earlier work knowing what she pulls off here, and you start seeing the foundations everywhere. Max’s emotional explosions in Better Things. Amber’s terrifying pivot in Scream. That feral energy in the Tarantino sequence. It was all pointing toward this.

Why You Should Watch Everything Now

The exciting part about following Mikey Madison’s career right now is that she’s at the perfect inflection point. Whether or not the Oscar comes her way next March, the Palme d’Or and the critical consensus have already done their work. Directors who might not have considered her before Anora are going to be fighting for her attention. She’s shown she can do indie drama, horror, comedy, and prestige all at once. Whatever projects she takes next, she has the rare luxury of choosing based on quality rather than exposure.

For anyone looking to explore more intense, character-driven performances while you wait for her next project, our drama collection has plenty to offer. And if you loved the chaotic energy of Anora, Uncut Gems hits a similar nerve with its manic pacing and characters who can’t stop pushing their luck. Both films share that feeling of watching someone sprint toward a cliff while absolutely convinced they’re about to fly.

Madison’s filmography isn’t long. You can get through her movie work in a weekend and binge Better Things across a week or two. But what’s there tells a clear story: an actor who understood her craft well before the rest of us caught on. Anora just made it impossible to ignore.