From the October 17, 2024, edition of L.A. Weekly:
On a night like any other, a girl is plucked out of an ordinary existence and chosen for something more. When Anora, a young sex worker in Brooklyn, played by the transformative Mikey Madison, meets Mark Eidelshtein’s Ivan in a neon-hued, satin-ensconced nightclub, a whirlwind romance quickly blossoms. It’s not long before the starry-eyed lovers run away to Vegas together and get married, their love story the makings of a real-life Cinderella fairytale. Still, reality finds a way, as it often does, to come crashing down upon their heads. Ivan’s the son of a Russian oligarch, and when his family catches wind of what their faraway offspring has been up to, they hurry to America to shatter Anora and Ivan’s nuptial bliss and have the marriage annulled as fast as possible.
“Sean [Baker] reached out after a horror film I did came out opening weekend, and he went to go see it,” Madison tells me about landing the titular role in the Tangerine director’s latest project. “That same week, we met and had coffee, and he pitched me this interesting, crazy movie idea and said, ‘If you want to do it, I’ll write it for you.’” Of course, Madison immediately agreed to be the muse for Baker’s next film. “I was absolutely thrilled at the idea of working with him and just overjoyed that he wanted to create something for me. I’ve never had a director reach out like that and see something in me before, whatever it was that he did see. It was special from the beginning, the collaboration that we were able to have.” …