Arriving for our 11 a.m. appointment, I have little trouble spotting the 27-year-old actor, who is seated alone inside of the barn. She’s dressed in a plaid pink button-down shirt tucked into blue jeans and a wide-brimmed hat, and she has used her surname, Rosberg, on the sign-in sheet.
(Only slightly compromising this just-a-normal-girl-ness are sunglasses from Christian Dior and a big gold locket she found in an antiques store while working in Budapest.) Madison is very soft-spoken, very pretty, and effortlessly polite, immediately offering to fetch me a hat from her car for the ride. (This being my first time on a horse in quite some time, I borrow a plastic helmet instead.) Then, following a brief introduction to our horses (a big, dark bay gelding named Walter for her; a smaller dark bay gelding named Floyd for me), we are on our merry way: our guide, Madison, me, and a rather mischievous girl of 12 or so who is a regular here.
A serious rider before she was an Oscar-winning actor, Madison came from equestriennes—her grandmother rode, her mother still does—and started early, competing in medal finals and doing drill team. Even so, as a child in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Woodland Hills, just north of the Santa Monica Mountains, she says she felt like “the black sheep” in her family.
It was one thing that none of her siblings—a twin brother, a younger brother, and two older half sisters—shared her horsiness, nor had they elected to be homeschooled in the seventh grade, as she had (to do more riding). Quite another was the matter of her striking looks: She had raven hair and almond-shaped eyes in a house otherwise full of redheads.
“I grew up with everyone assuming that my brothers were twins and that I was adopted,” Madison tells me, a fiction that delighted the boys—and that she herself sort of started to believe. (She eventually took a DNA test to put all that to bed.)
Her interest in acting was another anomaly. Though they liked movies well enough, her parents, both practicing psychologists, knew no one in the entertainment business.
“I think people have this understanding that all of Los Angeles is Hollywood, but it’s really not,” Madison says. “I grew up feeling completely separated and just totally unaware of any of that.” Still, visions of young women out and about, having experiences—in Pretty in Pink, The Princess Diaries, Frances Ha, Almost Famous (which Madison has watched every year on her birthday for more than a decade)—unhitched something.
As deeply as she loved riding, it was an isolating sport, and though she was, and still is, quite shy, “I do like people,” she says. “I like talking to them, and I want to participate in the world, and there was a big portion of my life where I was just too scared to.” She recognized acting as something that could shake her loose a bit and allow her to “play all different kinds of wild characters, or try on all these different kinds of personalities.”
So her trips to the barn became drives with her mom to auditions, sometimes five days per week. She got into the room for a handful of independent projects, including 2017’s Liza, Liza, Skies Are Grey, a road drama set in the 1960s.
That the filmmaker, Terry Sanders, had won two Oscars was a selling point, even if one was for a documentary about Maya Lin. (Though Madison looks mildly horrified when I bring it up, the movie was, she says, “overall a really sweet experience.
My mom was with me a lot. I actually saw the director at an Academy screening a year or two ago.
He was like, ‘I discovered you!’ ”)
If there is a through line in the work that followed, it’s how thoroughly unlike Mikaela Madison Rosberg all of the characters are. Madison has made a meal of screamers, fighters, girls with a lot of attitude and even a taste for violence, whereas the person I meet has all of a horsewoman’s most important traits: a straight back, balanced weight in her heels, a sure but gentle hand, and keen powers of observation.
(Noticing that the little girl in our group is very possibly being run away with, Madison halts our chat to flag the guide.) But while no part of her seems inclined toward chaos, I just know that she can sit a crazy buck.
The first of Madison’s three big breaks came when she booked Better Things, a dramatic comedy series created by Pamela Adlon and Louis C.K. She wasn’t yet 16. “It took hundreds of auditions for something to just stick,” she says. “So I was obviously out of my mind with excitement.”
As Max, she played the wild child eldest daughter of Adlon’s Sam Fox, a divorced jobbing actor raising her kids in LA. (When she first shows up in the pilot, Max is simply shrieking at her mother in the street.) Critically acclaimed, if a little overlooked—and briefly overshadowed by C.K.’s sexual misconduct allegations in late 2017, after which he was removed from the program—Better Things ran for five seasons.
It essentially taught Madison everything. “I learned how to be a professional person,” she says.
“I didn’t know anything about acting, about work, having a job.” She also did her first step-and-repeats, wearing to one premiere event a yellow dress that she bought at Goodwill for probably $8 with “a pair of Jessica Simpson heels.” In retrospect, she doesn’t think she looked half bad.
Madison’s second big break would arrive a couple of years into Better Things, when she was eager to see what else she could do. In 2018, she went up for Quentin Tarantino’s sprawling Western comedy-slash-alternate-history Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, a film now so associated with its scads of soon-to-be stars—Austin Butler, Sydney Sweeney, Maya Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Victoria Pedretti—that it’s easy to forget that, like, Al Pacino and Kurt Russell are also in it.
Madison went full throttle with her audition, reading a poem barefoot and gifting the director a painting she’d made in the style of a strung out Manson girl. (It included a bit of her hair.) When she was ultimately cast in the film as Sadie—who meets her grisly end by being mauled by a dog, beat up by Brad Pitt, and then set alight in a pool with a flamethrower wielded by Leonardo DiCaprio—Madison would find herself doing night shoots with Tarantino after spending the day on the Better Things set.
That was Sean Baker’s introduction to her: The filmmaker, known for his vivid, often darkly funny portraits of American lives on the margins (Tangerine, The Florida Project), had never seen Better Things, but Madison got his attention right away in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. “I thought she was stealing all of her scenes,” Baker says.
“In a three-hour movie, for her to come out of nowhere in the last 15 minutes and make such an impact—I remember even telling my wife, ‘Oh, there’s something special about her.’ And I think she was the one who said, ‘Yeah, she’s been on Pam Adlon’s show forever.’ ” Yet it was only after seeing her in 2022’s Scream, playing a snarky, dryly funny Woodsboro high schooler later unmasked as the Ghostface killer, that Baker sensed he’d found his next lead.
By then, he had a storyline for Anora but no real script; he prefers to write with an actor in mind. Madison, he thought, would give him a lot to work with.
“She had such a presence,” he says. Baker liked the subtle humor in her delivery, “and she proved that she could deliver the intensity—and the screaming.
I knew that this character was going to face a home invasion and needed to just scream.”
A spiritual cross between Pretty Woman and Uncut Gems, Anora follows Ani, a stripper and sex worker from Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, who weds a young client—the sweet but unserious son of a Russian oligarch—only to then have his scandalized parents go to extraordinary lengths to get the marriage annulled. “Sean sort of plucked me out and gave me this incredible opportunity and this amazing character who I couldn’t have been more different from,” Madison says.
“I wanted to do justice to the character, and I wanted to do justice to him.”
There was a tendency among entertainment journalists to call her elaborate preparation for Anora “Method”—installing a stripper pole in her home, taking Russian lessons, doing her own stunts. But all she was trying to do was sell it. “I recently had a meeting with a director who was like, ‘I didn’t know that you were actually an actress.’ And that’s the kind of thing that’s important to me.”
The demands of the experience, the agency that she felt in developing the role—it all set a standard for the kind of work Madison wants to do going forward. “Honestly, it took me so long to realize that I’m not just an actress for hire—that my voice is really important, and people care about my input.
It’s still a learning process, because I also have this people-pleasing tendency of just: yes, yes, okay,” she says. But she also has ideas of her own.
“There are things that don’t exist yet that I want to do.”
When, a few weeks before her 26th birthday, she mounted the stage of the Dolby Theatre to accept the Oscar for best actress in 2025, Madison—wearing a strapless, bow-fronted pink-and-black Dior ball gown reproduced from a 1956 design—became one of the youngest women ever to claim that prize. By now, the months leading up to the ceremony—starting with the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, where Anora won the Palme d’Or—are one big, bewildering blur to her.
“I think I was just sort of living outside of myself for a certain amount of time,” Madison says. “I definitely will pass by my shelf in my living room and be like, Oh, wow.
I guess that really did happen.”
I ask if the recognition felt, well…a little soon to her, even after a decade as a working actor. (The takes about Demi Moore—the odds-on favorite for her performance in The Substance, a lurid allegory for ageist misogyny—losing the Oscar to someone born in 1999 practically wrote themselves.) She pauses before answering this, in part because we are entering a tunnel that requires us to ride in single file.
“I’m definitely more of an anxious-leaning person,” she says at last. “I tend to be very practical, in terms of, keep your expectations low so you don’t hurt yourself…. I’ve always been like that. So I think that when it happened, it superseded every expectation I’d had for myself, ever.” Even the idea that she might not have to audition anymore was shocking.
When I ask Baker if, during the time they spent promoting Anora, he observed any changes in Madison—to her confidence, the way that she handled the press, anything—he tells me that, no, he doesn’t think he did. The campaign, to be clear, was “grueling,” he says, “like a whole other job.” Yet Madison appeared unfazed.
“She didn’t change. She’s the same sweet, wonderful, very intelligent and fun person that she was, and devoid of any diva attitude.”
Madison articulates the same thing another way: “I still feel like this working actor who feels the need to prove themselves.”
For Madison, signing on to play Haugen was a no-brainer. “You read a script like that and you’re like, I have to do this,” she says.
“It’s also a really interesting story to me, about this woman—this massive hero—that no one really knows about. She didn’t feel aligned with what she originally loved about that company and she did something pretty brave.” (The film also stars Jeremy Allen White as Horwitz and Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg, with sharp supporting turns from Wunmi Mosaku, Betty Gilpin, and Bill Burr.)
She did, however, have questions. Madison bore very little physical resemblance to Haugen, a blue-eyed, square-jawed blond, and the gap in their ages was fairly significant; Haugen was in her mid-30s when the events of the film took place. “I met Aaron, and I was like, ‘I love this script. This is an amazing character. But I don’t look like this person at all,’ ” Madison says.
She was open—willing, even—to undergo a total physical transformation; Anora had given her the appetite for that kind of thing. But it wasn’t at all what Sorkin had in mind. “Listen, if you’re playing Elvis or Lucille Ball, there’s an obligation to approximate some kind of physical or vocal impersonation,” Sorkin explains to me later. “But that wasn’t here. I wanted her to just play the character in the script.”
This threw Madison a bit. “For a while I was like, How do I play someone and use her name but not feel like I’m authentically representing her in that way?” (She recalls telling Sorkin that she’d read Haugen’s memoir—just “to have a better understanding of how things happened”—and registering some dismay in his reaction.) But Sorkin stood by his approach, “and I trusted him.” She has since written Haugen a letter and the two have “talked a little bit over email.
I think she really just wants the story to be told.”
To find her own Frances, Madison tried a few things. Reasoning that a woman with such a desk-bound job might have a “softer physicality,” she mostly stopped working out; and for the first time in her life, she dyed her hair and cut it to about shoulder length.
“I had this jet-black, waist-length hair. I didn’t feel like this woman who’s a data scientist, who works at a computer all day, would maintain that,” she says.
“Something that felt a little mousier felt more like the character to me.”
A closely guarded early screening of the film—still not quite finished—in August revealed that character to be a perfectly Sorkinian creation: wary, wry, and nerdily superior, given to spouting data points and calling out mixed metaphors. (Pity the colleague who compares her both to the Trojan priestess Cassandra and the boy who cried wolf.) Not long after they connect via LinkedIn DM, she and Horwitz are sparring like siblings—she, skeptical that he actually understands the information she’s leaking; he, disturbed by her belief that Facebook can still be a tool for good, even after seeing its emphasis on free speech and community-building distorted beyond recognition.
(The film’s dutiful unpicking of the ties that bind big tech, politics, and the media makes its early October release date—just a few weeks ahead of the midterm elections—especially apropos.)
I ask how Madison found White as a scene partner. Much of the movie has them hunched over a laptop, discussing the mechanics of Facebook’s algorithm. (There have also been some similarities in their particular career trajectories, with both working for years on a family dramedy before a darker, more-grown-up part made them a sudden sensation.) “Very sweet,” she says. “Very, very, very professional. Stoic. I appreciate his work ethic.”
Sorkin’s set could not have been more different from Sean Baker’s. “It was challenging, in some ways, especially because Anora was the movie that I did before Reckoning. That was an entirely different energy and vibe and had so much improvisation,” she says. “With Aaron’s dialogue, it’s scientifically perfected, in a way.”
He expects you to say it as written, I offer, intending it as a question.
“And I want to too,” Madison replies. “Because every line and every word is very intentional, and so it’s important to do that in a certain way.”
If she wobbled at all, adjusting to the rigors of his filmmaking style, Sorkin wasn’t aware of it. “Mikey doesn’t need much more than: Play it a little hotter…a little cooler….
Drive to the end of the line…, things like that, and she’s there,” he says. “As great as she was in Anora and as great as she is in The Social Reckoning, I’m certain that she hasn’t yet done the best work that she’s going to do.”
Of course, the funny thing about her playing a Facebook wonk is that Madison herself is not on social media at all. She was, for a time—in middle school she was one of the millions of other 13-year-olds Instagramming slices of pizza or cookies on a cooling rack—but it was never an obsession, and eventually she forgot the account existed.
(Only recently did her father discover that her Instagram was, indeed, still live.) Now it’s a more deliberate thing, staying offline. “It feels kind of big and vast and stressful,” she says, referring, it seems, to the internet in general.
Acting may have made her slightly less shy, but Madison still describes herself as “sensitive”—too nervous to read reviews (“I don’t think I ever did until Anora, but that was only after someone told me it was safe and I wouldn’t get my feelings hurt”) and certainly too delicate to confront a comments section.
I wonder how she’s coped with losing out on parts—how she handled, as a teenager, all the drives and the self-tapes that came to nothing. “If I’m honest,” she says, “it’s still something I’m learning.”
By this point, we’ve returned to the barn, hopped off our mounts (“The Western saddle feels different on the butt, doesn’t it?” she remarks with a giggle), and made our way to where she keeps the donkeys—rescues named Loulou (after the Isabelle Huppert movie) and Gus Freckles. After turning them out in a ring, we settle into Adirondack chairs to see them play.
(If you were curious what, exactly, one does with donkeys, it’s pretty much just this. “You walk them around, pet them, give them a snuggle,” Madison says.
“It’s just for fun.)
She is easily her happiest at home, surrounded by her animals; in addition to the donkeys, Madison has three Chihuahuas and one very patient cat. She has always loved to cook and bake, skills she picked up from her father, a onetime sous-chef.
(Later that day, in fact, she’ll be preparing a feast of miniature pizzas, kale-and-orzo salad, and peanut butter cookies to celebrate her mother’s birthday.) Gardening is a more recent hobby—she’s trying to branch out from tending to the succulents in her yard and start growing some vegetables and herbs.
When she’s in town, Madison reports that she sees her parents, who still live “deep in the Valley,” multiple times per week. Her twin, who has a background in finance, is also local, while her younger brother is away at graduate school, studying psychology.
(Though we sidestep the details of her dating life, she very much wants a family of her own one day. “I have always dreamed of getting married and that kind of white-picket-fence situation,” Madison says.
“My sisters have it and my friends are getting married and thinking about having kids. It definitely makes me think about that a lot.”) Earlier this year, she spent three months in Hungary shooting a new adaptation of The Masque of the Red Death; Loulou and Gus Freckles were gifts from the film’s director, Charlie Polinger.
When Madison left, her mother wept.
“She kept calling me and being like, ‘If you ever want me to come over, just let me know,’ ” Madison says. “I’m like, ‘That’s so sweet, but I actually do have to work.’ But my twin came and hung out for a while.”
As it happens, a dozen or so years after choosing acting over horses, Madison had to do a little riding for Masque. “I was so confident and cocky going into it,” she says.
“I was like, ‘You guys, I’ve got this, just show me where I need to go.’ ” But something surprising happened. “This horse was so amazing, it would hear them say ‘action’ on the walkie-talkie and it would take off.
Then it would see the camera and it would slow down.” It was funny—feeling like she knew what she was doing and then totally being taken for a ride. The first time it happened, “it scared the shit out of me,” Madison says.
But the crew, full of awe, couldn’t tell the difference. For all the world, she seemed in complete control the entire time.
In this story: hair, Jimmy Paul; makeup, Raoul Alejandre; manicurist, Kim Truong; tailor, Hasmik Kourinian.
Produced by Rosco Production. Set Design: Jeremy Reimnitz. Visuals Editor: Paige Viti.