The 2025 Oscars were full of surprises, and perhaps one of the most striking was Mikey Madison’s victory over Demi Moore in the fight for the Best Actress award. Madison won the award for her role as Ani in “Anora”, the Sean Baker film that swept the 2025 Oscars after taking home five awards from six nominations.

With this win, Mikey Madison confirms her status as a Hollywood superstar, but her path has not been easy. Although she is only 25 years old, her Oscar for Best Actress is a recognition of more than a decade of work and an acting career that exploded when Sean Baker chose her to star in “Anora”.

This is Mikey Madison

Mikaela Madison Rosberg, known simply as Mikey Madison, was born on March 25, 1999 in Los Angeles, the city where she grew up. During her childhood, she lived in the San Fernando Valley with her parents, both psychologists, her two brothers, and her two sisters. An interesting fact about Madison’s family, of Jewish descent, is that her parents homeschooled their children until the seventh grade, so Mikey Madison did not go to school until she was 12 years old.

It was precisely because she was studying at home that she enjoyed horse riding for a long time, which is a big hobby of her parents and siblings as well. Her family, especially her mother, has always had a passion for horses. They always had a stable in their home in Los Angeles, and Mikey Madison herself has commented on occasion that she was educated at home so she could spend all day with her pony.

Her love life

Mikey Madison’s personality and work are somewhat contradictory. Despite being an actress, she is a shy and introverted person. Unlike other Hollywood stars, she is not active on social media and does not usually talk about her private life.

In fact, not much is known about her love life either. She doesn’t have a confirmed partner, although in an interview with ‘The Los Angeles Times’ she spoke about one of her ex-boyfriends, who contacted her after seeing her at the cinema: “Some things don’t seem very genuine, like ex-boyfriends who come up to me and say: ‘Hey, do you want to get coffee or something? ’ Why? Why have you seen me on billboards?”

The choice between being an equestrian or an actress

Until she was 14, she trained almost every day to be an equestrian, but she was never sure that her future would be linked to horses. Despite being an introverted person, she felt a special interest in cinema from a young age, and being an actress became a life aspiration when one of her sisters married a writer.

However, she couldn’t be a rider and an actress at the same time. At 14, she opted for acting because, as she explained to Esquire magazine, being an equestrian ended up isolating her and she felt that if she wanted to be an actress she had to commit herself 100 percent to it. Horse riding took up too much of her time, so she bet everything on acting... and it worked out well for her .

Her career as an actress

Starting in 2013, Madison began her acting career in short films, gradually making a name for herself in the industry. In 2016, she got her first big break when she was cast as one of Pamela Adlon’s daughters in “Better Things”, a popular American television series.

Her next big break would come in 2019, when she played a great supporting role in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”. At that time, she emerged as one of the new stars of the decade and began to attract the attention of big directors. After seeing “Scream” (2022) on the first weekend of release, Sean Baker knew he wanted Mikey Madison for his next film, even though he didn’t yet know what film that was going to be.

The director liked the young actress' performance so much that he wanted her to star in his next film, which turned out to be “Anora”. Her dedication to succeeding with “Anora” is worthy of admiration. To prepare for her role, she moved to Brighton Beach, practiced dancing, learned to twerk and changed her accent. All that effort paid off at the 2025 Academy Awards.

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