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Fresh off her Academy Award win for best actress for her breakthrough role in Anora, Mikey Madison has been at the center of much chatter and interest, including around her background and ethnicity. The actress beat out fellow nominees Cynthia Erivo, Karla Sofía Gascón, Fernanda Torres and frontrunner Demi Moore to collect one of the ceremony’s highest honors, but her relative greenness in the industry has naturally led to curiosity among her legions of newfound fans.
Presenting your 97th Oscars acting winners:
• Adrien Brody in ‘The Brutalist’ (Best Actor)
• Mikey Madison in ‘Anora’ (Best Actress)
• Kieran Culkin in ‘A Real Pain’ (Supporting Actor)
• Zoe Saldana in ‘Emilia Pérez’ (Supporting Actress)Photo Credit: Matt Sayles pic.twitter.com/Y0PwHsJBPW
— The Academy (@TheAcademy) March 3, 2025
Despite Anora serving as her breakout moment, Madison had quietly amassed a sizable credits list in the years’ prior to her Oscar win, starring in franchises like Scream and lending her voice to blockbuster animations like The Addams Family. However, much of Madison’s pre-fame history remains shrouded in questions, like her ethnicity.
Mikey Madison was born in Los Angeles.
While Mikey Madison is American by nationality — having been born and raised in Los Angeles, California — the actress is said to be of Polish, Lithuanian, and Russian Jewish roots. She has spoken about these roots in previous interviews, particularly mentioning how they played a role in her screen test for Anora. Speaking with Allure, Madison recalled how, during the screen test, “moisture hit my hair [and] it just went…really curly [and] frizzy.” After Sean Baker, who directed the film, asked about her hair, Madison said she simply replied: “‘I’m Jewish.’ Like, I don’t know what you mean.”
Madison has elaborated on her Jewish heritage in other interviews, too. She said on the Happy Sad Confused podcast late last year that she grew up as “a proud non-practicing Jew,” adding that while she never became a bat mitzvah, she still “wish[es] I was.” Madison revealed in the same interview that her father had a “big bar mitzvah” in Israel, but that she was not given the equivalent ritual “for some reason.” The actress said that she was raised Jewish and described herself as a “spiritual person.”
Coincidentally, Madison’s titular character in Anora shares similar roots with the actress herself, since Anora can speak the language because her grandmother only speaks Russian and no English. Baker said in an interview that he conceived of Anora as being “of Russian ethnicity,” and said the character is “from one of the post-Soviet countries.”
Madison’s background has been questioned by fans in the past.
Even before her current success, fans were curious as to Madison’s ethnicity. After starring in the 2022 iteration of Scream, many fans took to social media to ponder whether Madison was of Asian descent. “Why is everyone calling Mikey Madison Asian?” a Reddit post from three years ago reads.
All these years I thought Mikey Madison was Asian. She looks like Japanese, I just google search about her, she is not Asian at all. 😲
— lipton (@lipton123) May 25, 2024
Many Redditors expressed surprise at the discovery that Madison wasn’t of Asian descent, or at least had not spoken of being Asian in the past. Some Redditors recalled similar questions swirling around fellow actors like Miranda Cosgrove and Taylor Lautner, neither of whom are of Asian descent.