Writer-director Sean Baker is known for his unconventional casting. He met Tangerine’s Black transgender sex workers on the streets of Los Angeles, he plucked The Florida Project’s struggling young mom from Instagram, and he spotted Red Rocket’s drug dealer in the documentary What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire.
For his latest film, the rollicking, fractured fairy tale Anora, which won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, he and his wife, producer Samantha Quan, chose Mikey Madison (Better Things, Once upon a Time in Hollywood) as the titular character, a savvy Russian-American erotic dancer and sex worker who goes by “Ani.”
But as Ivan, the spoiled, hard-partying son of a Russian oligarch, they cast 22-year-old Russian actor Mark Eydelshteyn on the strength of an audition tape in which he appeared naked in bed (save for a Russian hat), vaping, and talking in a mix of Russian and English. After watching the tape, Baker not only knew he had his Ivan but started building the character with him in mind.
Back home, Eydelshteyn has had lead roles in film and on TV and been dubbed a Russian Timothée Chalamet by the press. “Honestly, I don’t know why they are comparing me with him, but it’s a compliment,” says the lanky, blue-eyed young actor.
Despite that success, Eydelshteyn—who had never heard of Baker—was reluctant to audition for any American director. He was completing his studies at the prestigious Moscow Art Theatre School and acting on a TV show with Yura Borisov, whom Baker had already cast in Anora as a soulful henchman, when the popular Russian performer recommended his young co-star.
“He is a kind kid, open to the whole world, who is trying to find a home and love [despite] a very difficult relationship with his family,” Eydelshteyn says of the video-game-playing man-child, who’s living his best life in his parents’ lavish, four-story, seaside Brooklyn home, fueled by drugs, alcohol, and trips to strip clubs.
When Ivan impulsively marries Ani during a whirlwind trip to Las Vegas, his furious parents jet off to New York and send their local fixer (Karren Karagulian) and his associates (Vache Tovmasyan and Borisov) to get the marriage annulled.
Naturally, a story about a sex worker and her eager client includes lots of sex scenes. Eydelshteyn has done them before and wasn’t bothered by the lack of an intimacy coordinator. “It’s the first time I heard about it,” he says of the on-set role. “Our intimacy coordinators were Sean and Sammy.” Besides, he adds, “Sean said it’s not sex scenes—it’s sex shots. Usually, sex scenes, it’s something really romantic…. But these [are] just part of the plot.” (During Ani and Ivan’s first encounter, she asks him if he wants anything special, and he replies, “Special sex,” and does a backflip onto the bed.)
As for the film’s much-talked-about, 28-minute, real-time home-invasion/fight sequence, Eydelshteyn soaked up the action from the sidelines. “It was very interesting to me how Sean is working and doing choreography. How Mikey is playing all [of] this crazy episode. What Yura is physically doing—what is his choice to play—and Karren and Vache. I tried to be on the set during [the] eight days, and it was amazing.”
Eydelshteyn has already secured a U.S. agent, but there’s still the question about how the movie, his first in English, will be received at home in Nizhny Novgorod. He knows his 18-year-old brother will see the R-rated film. But his conservative parents—his mother is a speech coach, and his father is a sports journalist—are another matter. “I’m trying to prepare them somehow,” he says. “But all [of] this stuff sounds like a fairy tale coming from me.”
Lisa Liebman is a writer whose work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Vulture, the Cut, and W magazine
