Mikey Madison, the Oscar Winner Who Turned Down Star Wars to Play a Whistleblower

Mikey Madison

Photo: Frank Sun / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 25, 1999 Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, Anora, Scream
Awards	Academy Award · BAFTA · Independent Spirit

The most revealing decision Mikey Madison has made since winning her Oscar never reached a screen. Offered a part in Star Wars: Starfighter, the Shawn Levy production that would have turned her into a franchise fixture, she said no, and took instead the role of a data engineer who spends most of her film trying not to be noticed. Frances Haugen, the Facebook employee who carried thousands of pages of internal documents to The Wall Street Journal, is the centre of Aaron Sorkin‘s The Social Reckoning, and she is everything Ani, the Brighton Beach dancer who made Madison famous, was not: guarded, soft-spoken, allergic to spectacle.

That swerve fits a career that has rarely taken the obvious road. Mikaela Madison Rosberg grew up in Los Angeles, the fourth of five children of two psychologists, Michael and Tracy Rosberg, and the twin of one of her brothers. Her childhood in Santa Clarita and then Woodland Hills was organised around horses rather than auditions; she competed as a rider until, in her early teens, she switched to acting, and homeschooling after seventh grade gave her the hours to do it. She still keeps no social media accounts, explaining that they do not feel authentic or natural to her, which among performers of her generation amounts to a position.

Her first sustained job came at 17 (she was born on March 25, 1999), playing Max Fox, the eldest and most combustible of the three daughters in Pamela Adlon’s FX series Better Things, a part she kept for five seasons from 2016 to 2022. Adlon’s show ran on overlapping conversations and unfinished arguments, and Madison learned there to hold a scene by being irritated in it, a teenager whose sulks always had a reason underneath. It was television that critics cherished and comparatively few people watched: an apprenticeship more than a launchpad.

Quentin Tarantino supplied the launch, if a strange one. In Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, released in 2019, she played Susan “Sadie” Atkins, one of the Manson followers who walk up the wrong driveway in the film’s final act, and she got the most outrageous exit in the picture, shrieking in a swimming pool at the wrong end of Leonardo DiCaprio’s flamethrower. Three years later the 2022 revival of Scream, directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, cast her as Amber Freeman, the friend who turns out to be holding the knife. Two genre films in a row asked her to play the person nobody should have trusted.

Sean Baker was watching. The director had admired her in the Tarantino film, but it was Scream, seen in a cinema with his wife, that settled it: he called her representatives the next day and pitched an idea he offered to write around her. The result was Anora, in which she plays Ani, a dancer at a Manhattan strip club who marries the son of a Russian oligarch in Las Vegas and spends the rest of the film fighting the men sent to undo it. She trained on the pole for months, learned basic Russian and built a Brooklyn accent from the ground up, and the performance runs on a kind of furious comic stamina that the film’s second half turns, almost without warning, into grief. Before it opened she had also taken a supporting role as Judith in Lady in the Lake, Alma Har’el’s Apple TV+ miniseries led by Natalie Portman.

Anora won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May 2024. The awards that followed were hers. In February 2025 she took the BAFTA for Leading Actress and the Independent Spirit Award for Best Lead Performance, and on March 2, 2025 she won the Academy Award for Best Actress at 25, beating Demi Moore, whom much of the season had treated as the favourite.

The win carried an argument with it. Talking to Pamela Anderson for Variety’s Actors on Actors series, Madison said the production had offered her an intimacy coordinator and that she and her co-star Mark Eydelshteyn chose to keep the set small instead, approaching the sex scenes as a job in service of Baker’s commitment to authenticity. The response online was fierce. Critics argued that coordinators exist precisely so the decision does not rest on the performer, and the intimacy coordinator Marci Liroff pointed out that it is next to impossible for an actor to refuse someone with hiring and firing power. Madison’s defenders answered that she was an adult making an informed choice about her own work. The episode exposed a contradiction the Anora campaign never settled: a film praised for its tenderness toward a sex worker also became a demonstration of how much the industry still leaves to one actress’s nerve.

What she did next is the clearest answer to the question of what an Oscar is for. Besides Star Wars: Starfighter, she passed on Resident Evil and Sgt. Rock, and waited for Sorkin. In The Social Reckoning, which Sorkin wrote and directed as a companion piece to his script for The Social Network, she plays Haugen opposite Jeremy Allen White as the Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz, with Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg. Madison has called the part an intellectual transformation rather than a physical one, and the reviews bear her out. The film itself has divided critics, but the notices have tended to single her out for a Haugen so withdrawn that it is hard to tell how much of the character’s skittishness is fear of corporate retaliation and how much is temperament.

The film premiered in London at the end of September, played New York on October 4 and opens in American cinemas on October 9, 2026. It is her first lead since Anora, and the first real measure of whether the voters who rewarded the loudest performance of their year will follow her into the quietest.

The slate behind it is equally unwilling to repeat itself. In The Masque of the Red Death, Charlie Polinger’s A24 reimagining of Edgar Allan Poe, she plays twin sisters, a noblewoman and her hidden double, opposite Léa Seydoux. Alejandro Landes, the Colombian director of Monos, has cast her with Kirsten Dunst in Reptilia, a Florida thriller about a dental hygienist drawn into the exotic animal trade, and Elijah Bynum’s My Darling California puts her alongside Jessica Chastain, Josh Brolin and Chris Pine. None of them is a franchise. Polinger’s twins will test the method first: an actress who won the biggest prize in her profession by playing one woman at full volume has chosen, as her next trick, to play two at once.

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Tags: actors, actresses, American cinema, Aaron Sorkin, Sean Baker, The Social Reckoning, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Anora, Mikey Madison

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