When Mikey Madison won her Oscar, it was presented to her by Emma Stone because she was the Best Actress winner in 2023. But it was much more serendipitous than that, as Madison was the first Best Actress winner in her 20s since Stone herself won her first Oscar for “La La Land” in 2016. And perhaps as the years go by, it will be seen as an even bigger “passing the torch” moment down the line.
As far as we know, Stone is nowhere near giving up her torch as the most decorated actress of her generation, given her two Oscars wins, her burgeoning producing career for films like “A Real Pain” and “I Saw the TV Glow,” and her partnership with Yorgos Lanthimos continuing with “Bugonia” this fall. At this point, she has reached the kind of echelon in her career where young breakout actresses dream of being “the next Emma Stone” – and now Madison is at the front of that line.
In that context, it is extra ironic and fitting that Madison’s first move after winning the Oscar was to host “Saturday Night Live” this past weekend – a show where Stone is part of their “Five-Timers” hosting club. Nonetheless, since she currently has no follow-up movies after “Anora” booked yet, there’s no telling where Madison’s post-Oscar career and tastes for her next projects will go. Whether or not she keeps following a similar path to Stone is unknown, especially since she’s already ahead of her in a few ways.
Like Stone, Madison obviously got into the business at a very young age and first got on the radar with supporting roles. Technically, Stone started out on television with the short-lived FOX series “Drive” in 2007, months before her big screen breakout in “Superbad,” whereas Madison started out with years of work on the much more acclaimed FX family comedy/drama “Better Things.” After they both transitioned into movies full time, Stone worked more frequently in films like “Zombieland,” “Easy A” and the two “The Amazing Spider-Man” movies, whereas Madison was more selective with two supporting, scenery-chewing performances in “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” and “Scream” 2022.
Nonetheless, while Stone and Madison took different routes, they each took roughly around the same time to get on the Academy’s radar. Approximately 7-8 years after each of them had their first big break, they wound up getting their first Oscar nominations for eventual Best Picture winners – Stone with “Birdman” in 2014 and Madison with “Anora” 10 years later. Yet the results were different for them individually, as Stone lost Best Supporting Actress despite all of “Birdman’s” other wins, while Madison won Best Actress as part of “Anora’s” big Oscar night sweep.
Even though Stone did win Best Actress two years later before winning it again seven years later, she still didn’t win the first time out of the gate as Madison did. In that regard, Madison is ahead of her pace and also ahead of fellow early 20’s Best Actress winner Jennifer Lawrence, who also won Best Actress two years after losing her first nomination. Still, the pace they set in the long term is an even more daunting one for Madison to match in the future.
From 2010 to 2015, Lawrence was the biggest young actress of that mini-era, with four Oscar nominations, one win, and two hit franchises. Almost immediately after Lawrence stepped back, Stone has filled the gap ever since, with four Oscar nominations as an actress and two wins in the past 10 years. Now will Madison be the next young starlet to follow in Stone’s footsteps, just as Stone followed in Lawrence’s?
Madison doesn’t quite have the kind of blockbuster resume Stone already had before her Oscar wins, or at the least, she has it in different ways. Unlike Stone’s time on “The Amazing Spider-Man” series, Madison had only one appearance in the “Scream” series before her memorable death scene. And while “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” wasn’t a franchise film, the Quentin Tarantino collection is a cinematic universe onto itself – which also killed Madison off in a very memorable fashion. Either way, while Madison has been in blockbusters before, she wasn’t a co-headliner like Stone was before her Oscar success and certainly didn’t lead them as Lawrence did.
Of course, now that Madison is an Oscar winner and a new budding A-lister, she will likely be fancast or rumored to be cast in many a Marvel, DC, or Disney project until she actually joins one of them. However, given how Brie Larson’s post-Oscar movie career has been creatively stalled after joining the Marvel and “The Fast and the Furious” universes, that could serve as a kind of cautionary tale. In addition, Stone getting written off “The Amazing Spider-Man” series right as it collapsed was the best thing that ever happened to her, given what immediately followed with “Birdman” and “La La Land.”
With that creative freedom, Stone found her niche with Lanthimos and has stayed by his side ever since in “The Favourite,” “Poor Things,” “Kinds of Kindness,” and “Bugonia.” Madison already found such a distinctive, darkly comedic, indie-driven partner/director in Sean Baker for “Anora,” although time will tell if they keep working together the way Stone has with Lanthimos. If not, she will need to find the same luck with different auteurs that she had with Tarantino and Baker.
Yet, considering how Madison’s career has gone so far, she may not be in such a hurry to find them or anyone else. Perhaps the best thing working to her advantage right now is her exclusivity and her more careful and selective pace in projects. Lawrence was famously overexposed to the point of severe if unwarranted backlash she’s still fighting to come back from, along with Anne Hathaway, not long after her own Oscar win in 2012. Even Stone stepped away from the spotlight with only a few live-action projects between 2018 and 2023 – though giving birth in 2021 was an additional factor – before her reemergence with “Poor Things.”
It is a sad but prevalent tradition to build young actresses up, claim they are overexposed or have worn out their welcome at the first opportunity, and then drive them out of the limelight until they have to make “comebacks” in their 30s. The likes of Lawrence and Hathaway had to fight through it after their Oscar wins at a young age, and so did Stone and Natalie Portman to a less severe degree. Now, it appears it will be Madison’s turn soon enough to fight through such narratives, one way or the other.
At the moment, Stone is the gold standard for the likes of Madison to live up to, considering her continued long-term success with the Academy, her continued branching out as both an actress and a producer, and her ability to avoid the kind of creative and personal backlash other peers couldn’t for various fair and mostly unfair reasons. If that’s the kind of path Madison can stay on in a post “Anora” career, in ways both similar and very different from Stone, their snapshot together on Oscar night will look even more historic than it already was that evening.
What is next for Mikey Madison? Where would you like to see her career go from here? Please let us know in the comments section below and on Next Best Picture’s X account.
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