Mikey Madison's 5 Essential Roles (And 2 To Look Out For)
From becoming an unlikely Scream queen in the late 2010s to winning the Oscar for Best Actress a few years later — and just a weeks shy of her 26th birthday — Mikey Madison's rise since breaking out on Better Things has been nothing if not meteoric.
Since that glittering Oscar campaign, the L.A. native has understandably taken a moment to catch her breath, but the next year or so will see her return to the world's biggest screens in a serious way. First up is Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, in which Madison gives a wonderfully mousey (and perfectly Sorkiny) lead performance as the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, in what is a spiritual sequel to The Social Network, a 2010 David Fincher masterpiece that Sorkin also wrote.
When the dust has settled on this one, it won't be long before Madison is back with us thanks to two upcoming (and very exciting looking) movies that are slated for release in 2027. Read on for a bit more on each of them as well as five of her most essential roles to date.
Though just 16 at the time she was cast, Madison had already worked on a movie and a couple of shorts by the time that she landed the role of Pamela Adlon’s eldest daughter in Better Things. Whichever way you look at it, though, the acclaimed five-season show (which ran from 2016 to 2022) played an enormous part in helping Madison get her foot in the door in Hollywood.
Originally created by Adlon and Louis CK (who was then at the very peak of his popularity), the show is very much in keeping with the warts-and-all, semi-autobiographical style that a lot of popular comedians were trying out at the time (think Trainwreck, Top Five), with Adlon playing a divorced actress and mother of three who was clearly based on herself.
Fun fact: if you look at what Adlon's real-life daughters have been up to in the industry, this means that Madison was basically playing future Blockers star Gideon Adlon, with future Marty Supreme star Odessa A'zion, the middle sister of Adlon's trio, being portrayed by Hannah Alligood on the show.
Bundle HD
As no shortage of recent Instagram reels could've told you, the casting of the Manson girls in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood is already the stuff of legend.
Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2019, the Spahn Ranch scenes in Quentin Tarantino’s movie boast a remarkable who's who of up-and-coming stars: including a pre-Euphoria Sydney Sweeney, a pre-Stranger Things Maya Hawke and a pre-Elvis Austin Butler, along with Margaret Qualley, Lena Dunham, future scream queen Victoria Pedretti and our very own Mikey Madison.
You could note that there are a lot of nepo babies in that line-up (I'd argue that's probably by design) but Madison, to her credit, isn’t one of them. And in playing the pivotal role of Sadie Atkins, she kind of outshines them all.
Blowing up thanks to an FX comedy show and a melancholy Quentin Tarantino classic isn’t the most obvious route to becoming a scream queen, but Madison’s performance as Sadie, the most psychotic of the Manson girls (and the one who meets the most grizzly end), clearly showed she had the chops for horror.
This is presumably why, less than two years later, Madison appeared amongst the cast of the fifth Scream movie, a legacy sequel starring Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega in which Madison once again (spoiler alert?) got to play a deranged and cartoony lunatic.
With regards to the Scream universe, the fifth movie is a more than solid addition to the franchise and easily the best since Craven's original three.
No points for guessing that Anora would pop up on this list: Sean Baker’s 2024 hit — a perfect blend of slapstick comedy and gritty, New American Cinema-inspired crime drama — was the first American movie to win both the Palme d’Or in Cannes and Best Picture at the Oscars since Marty in 1956.
It's also a modern classic and Madison is at the very centre of everything great about it: playing the titular role of a sex worker from Queens who marries an oligarch’s son, Madison was pure heart, energy and aura.
On the movie's lengthy and successful Oscar campaign, Baker wisely positioned Anora as Madison's movie, which led to her own win on Oscar night against a much favoured Demi Moore (for The Substance).
Given how much justifiable love and respect there is for The Social Network, Sorkin’s unnoficial follow-up (a movie that's probably too short on style and too high on optimism to even warrant a comparison) will likely have its detractors. What The Social Reckoning does have, in my opinion, is the most entertaining example of Sorkin’s signature rat-a-tat dialogue that we've seen in years — along with a cast of actors who know how to deliver it.
Jeremy Strong will get most of the headlines for his rapier-sharp caricature of Mark Zuckerberg, but the screwball chemistry between Madison (as Facebook Files whistleblower Frances Haugen) and Jeremy Allen White (as Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Jeff Horowitz) is, for me, the main reason to go see this movie.
Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival to great acclaim last year (even Charlie XCX was a fan), Charlie Pollinger’s debut movie The Plague didn’t quite have the impact upon release that many expected. Not to worry: the movie put Pollinger solidly on the map and by the looks of things, his second feature already looks like a significant leveling up.
Adapted from a legendary Edgar Allen Poe short story, The Masque of the Red Death will see Pollinger move into the realms of gothic horror with a strong international cast at his disposal — led by Madison, Lea Seydoux, Benedict Wong, and the great German character actor, Franz Rogowski.
The original story centers on a prince (played here by Rogowski) who throws an elaborate masquerade ball in order to keep himself and his fellow nobles entertained as they shield themselves from a plague that is ravaging the townspeople outside. Little is known about the particulars of Pollinger’s adaptation at this point, but its placement on the 2023 “Black List” and the fact that Madison is playing the lead suggests that we can expect something a little different from previous adaptations.
After Pollinger’s movie, which shot last February, the next Madison joint we can expect to see is My Darling California, a crime thriller that entered production in September 2026.
For this one, Madison is part of a starry ensemble cast which also includes Chris Evans and Jessica Chastain. Even less is known about this plot, aside from a brief synopsis online describing it as a movie of interconnected characters, each of whom are affected in different ways by a single crime. The director is Elijah Bynum, a filmmaker whose breakout critical hit, Magazine Dreams, got buried by the studio after allegations surfaced regarding the movie’s star, Jonathan Majors.
We expect My Darling California to bring Bynum back into the conversation, where he belongs.
