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.”
