I Genuinely Can’t Watch “Anora” The Same Way Again After Reading These BTS Facts About Filming

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Sean and Karren have been good friends for over 25 years and Karren has been in every single one of Sean’s films. For a long time, they had an idea to write about Brighton Beach’s Russian-American community because Karren has ties to that community, and his wife is Russian-American (she even played his character’s wife in the church scene). Sean and Karen once even wrote a buddy-comedy movie about this community that was never produced. It wasn’t until after Sean’s movie Red Rocket (2021) that he decided it was really time to revisit the idea and then they came up with Anora. 

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Sean said that Mikey first captured his attention in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (2019). He felt she stole the show in the last 15 minutes and he loved her scenes so much, that he saw the movie two more times just to rewatch her parts. “So she was in my head, but then I saw Scream, and it was actually the combination of those two performances,” Sean explained. He said in these roles he saw that she could be intense and could scream. He added, “She was playing a young adult in Scream. One with a lot of attitude. One that could hold her own in a fight. And, well, it was really just that combo that made me say she’s the one.” He and Samantha Quan, his producer and wife, made the decision to cast Mikey while in the theater of Scream and they called Mikey’s reps immediately after. Then Mikey and Sean met for coffee, he pitched a loose idea for the movie, and she agreed on the spot. 

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“Obviously, like, I felt safe doing it the whole time. I think those were just kind of little accidents that happened,” Mikey explained. “It was important for me to do all my stunts. I wanted to feel, like, what my character was going through. And you can see my face, and so, that feels really real.”  

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“I broke my acrylic nail off with the real nail underneath during one of the fight scenes. And so he carried a bottle of, like, medical glue in his pocket and was, like, gluing it on every morning and night,” Mikey shared.

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She said Russian was a very complicated language, and so it was one of the things that was most important to her to get right. “That was something that required a lot of time and dedication to just really understand what I was saying, be able to understand what the other actors were saying to me,” she elaborated.

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To make the set feel like an actual club, they allowed supporting and background actors to walk around the club freely and talk out loud instead of mouthing words. The film’s producer also DJed and played music during the scene. They put Mikey on a wireless microphone and filmed her for 10 minutes straight as she made her rounds as Ani attempting to get club patrons to buy a dance from her.

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Mikey said that scene in the script was just written as “Ani shows off her dancer’s flexibility.” From that, Mikey started thinking of ways should show that and came up with the idea of Ani doing an erotic dance for Ivan. She helped choreograph it with her dance instructor. She practiced the routine and sent it to Sean the night before filming to which she said he replied, “Perfect! Let’s make a music video out of it.” 

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Mikey explained that, “I really tried to do my due diligence, so I could fully understand what that world is like, because I was coming from basically having no understanding at all to wanting to accurately portray a sex worker in modern times.”

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Vache Tovmasyan explained how he’s been doing comedy in Armenia for 16 years when he got a call from Sean Baker, who told Vache he’d seen his comedy after Karren suggested him for the movie. Vache then looked up Karren on social media and found that Karren had messaged him five years prior to compliment his comedy. Vache then replied to Karren’s message. 

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“I’m very proud of some of my improved insults. Um, there’s one that’s, like, full of cuss words though,” Mikey shared. “I think the F-word is Ani’s favorite word and one that just, like, flows from her mouth very easily. And so, I utilized that, and every possible iteration of it as much as possible.”