At the Donut Hut, a retro walk-up counter on a corner in Burbank, California, Sean Baker, the writer/director of Anora, which is nominated for six Oscars, was setting up an establishing shot with Mikey Madison, his film’s star. A burnt orange 1970s Ford Pinto with ripped leather seats and a pair of fuzzy dice dangling from the rearview mirror was parked haphazardly on the curb. An unsuspecting doughnut shop owner, played by Randall Park, wiped red picnic tables under the space-age red and yellow shop awning. Madison, wearing a JW Anderson blue satin minidress and red heels, squinted against the sun blazing overhead and slammed the passenger side door of her getaway car. “Okay, you’re on a mission,” Baker told her. “You’re going to take this place down! You’re going to eat as many doughnuts as possible!”
Baker was giddy watching Madison on the monitor. By his side was his wife and producer, Samantha Quan, holding their Chihuahua mix, Bunsen. “It’s about these crazy doughnut bandits who raid this shop daily,” he said of the concept behind his W shoot. “And the poor shop owner has to deal with these models who come out of nowhere.” Baker nicknamed Madison’s character Sprinklelina. For her accomplices, he cast Squid Game’s Hoyeon and Conor Sherry, a promising young actor he’d just seen in the 2024 indie Snack Shack. Baker’s direction to everyone was simple: spaghetti western meets The Walking Dead. “But instead of human flesh, they need doughnuts,” he said. “I’m starting to lean more into comedy with my films, so why not go fully there?”
The doughnut shop is a recurring theme in the Baker cinematic universe. It is where trans sex workers gather in Tangerine—his 2015 film that was shot on an iPhone and became the talk of that year’s Sundance Film Festival—and where a washed-up porn star, played by Simon Rex, finds a 17-year-old cashier named Strawberry working behind the counter in 2021’s Red Rocket. Nonetheless, Baker said he has no special connection to doughnut shops. “I don’t even eat doughnuts!” he insisted. (“He totally does,” Quan told me.) But he wanted the W spread to look like stills from one of his films, which is why he asked Alexis Zabé, the cinematographer who’d brought cotton candy hues to Baker’s 2017 film, The Florida Project, to shoot it. The goal, he explained, is for someone to say, “Oh, I didn’t know Sean had made a new film.”
Though Baker’s tousled hair and boyish features often get him lumped in with a younger generation of directors, at 53, he is already eight films into his career. He wanted to shoot a movie in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn’s Russian immigrant enclave, known for its rumbling subway tracks and sea of fur coats, long before he had the idea for Anora, a story about a stripper (she goes by Ani) who marries Ivan, a Russian oligarch’s disobedient son. Baker was still a student at New York University in the 1990s when he met Karren Karagulian, an Armenian who had immigrated to Brighton Beach and sold caviar on the neighborhood’s street corners. Baker originally wrote a Russian gangster buddy comedy. It wasn’t until years later, after he met some “Ani types,” that he rewrote the film as an off-the-rails Pretty Woman. (Karagulian, whom Baker has cast in all of his films, plays Toros, the Armenian henchman who takes Ani captive.)
As Madison, Hoyeon, and Sherry descended on the shop—Madison pounding on the glass, Hoyeon snarling, Sherry clawing and zombie-walking—Baker was inside, directing the shots from behind the trays of crullers and pink-glazed, chocolate, and rainbow-sprinkle doughnuts. “Can someone tell Hoyeon that what she’s doing with her arms is wonderful?” he said, poking his head out of the order window. To make Madison, who is five feet three, seem more menacing in the frame, Baker asked for a booster box. “Are you calling me short?” she joked.
When Baker approached Madison about playing Ani, she didn’t believe him. “No one had ever written a script for me,” she told me in her trailer, where she changed into a pink leather Miu Miu skirt. Madison had never been offered a job without having to audition. She asked her agent to make sure it was real. “I’ve had my heart broken before,” she said.
At the time, Madison was perhaps best known as the eldest daughter in the show Better Things and the Manson girl Leonardo DiCaprio sets on fire in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. But Baker rarely chases A-listers for his films, preferring instead to cast newcomers alongside nonactors he has found on Instagram, in a Florida Target, or on the streets of the Texas Gulf Coast, where he cast a woman in Red Rocket after jump-starting her car. “I refuse to do the whole ‘Who can we get for this film?’ ” said Baker. “Like, ‘Let’s put Jennifer Lawrence and DiCaprio together’—that is the opposite of the way I think.”
Madison, who is nominated for a best actress Oscar for her role, learned to pole dance and speak Russian. Her Ani is scrappy, vulnerable, tough, and funny. A line in the script read, “Ani shows off her dancer’s flexibility,” which Madison took as an opportunity to choreograph a whole dance routine. When she debuted it for Baker and Quan, they were so impressed that Baker made it a set piece in the film, a memorable scene in which Ani performs a striptease for Ivan, played by Mark Eydelshteyn, in his mansion as the afternoon light filters in. Baker shot it like a music video to Brooke Candy’s “Drip,” Madison’s chosen song. “That song is so dirty,” said Baker, laughing, “It’s perfect for one of my movies.”
The interior of the shop was a tight 500-square-foot space filled with fly swatters, rolling pins, towers of pink confection boxes, and bins of sugar and buttermilk. Once the bandits made it inside, it was time to go ham. Madison attacked trays of doughnuts, stuffing them into her mouth, while Hoyeon kneeled on a metal counter, tormenting the shop owner. The floor soon turned into a mess of sprinkles and dough. “Yes!” exclaimed Baker as Madison twisted her face into a demonic smile. “That insane look—I love it.” He thought the shop owner should call the police. “Do we have a landline somewhere?” he asked.
Hair for Mikey Madison and Hoyeon by Bryce Scarlett at the Wall Group; makeup for Mikey Madison and Hoyeon by Nina Park at Kalpana; grooming for Randall Park and Conor Sherry by Anna Bernabe for Phytosurgence at Kalpana; manicures by Emi Kudo for Dior Beauty. Production design by Gille Mills at 11th House.
Producer to Sean Baker: Samantha Quan; Cop played by chris o’brien; Produced by Connect The Dots; Executive Producer: Wes Olson; Producer: Zack Higginbottom; Production manager: Nicole Morra; Production coordinators: Dan Morrison, David Cahill; Camera Assistant: Bas Tiele; Lighting Gaffer: Nghia Khuu; BB Grip: Darrin Stuckwich; Digital Imaging Technician: Zack Marchinsky; Retouching: DTouch Creative; Styling assistants: Tyler VanVranken, Laura Jaimes, Lauren Marron, Raea Palmieri, Frankie Benkovic; Hair assistants: Christopher Farmer, Tommy Le; Makeup assistants: Yukari Bush, Olga Pirmatova; Manicure assistants: Sayo Irie, Rico Nashimoto; Production design assistants: George Deacon, Cory James Bailey; Production assistants: Danielle Rouleau, Khari Cousins, Soheyl Hamzavi, Tchad Cousins; Tailor: Irina Tshartaryan at Susie’s Custom Designs, Inc.
