Isabella Rossellini and Mikey Madison have two of the most complicated roles of the year in “Conclave” and “Anora,” respectively. In Edward Berger’s Vatican-set thriller “Conclave,” Rossellini had to perform largely without speaking, as her nun character is silent through much of the film. And in “Anora,” Madison had to infuse her title character with an outward bite that fell apart in the movie’s final scene, an emotional breakdown that the actress worked hard to nail.
But immediately upon sitting down for TheWrap’s longform video series Visionaries, Rossellini and Madison made clear they were big fans of each other’s work – Madison even revealed that her mother showed her “Death Becomes Her” when she decided she wanted to be an actress.
“There was something that sort of struck inside me that made me really yearn for what these people were doing on screen, or how to become a part of that in some way,” Madison said of her desire to become an actress at the age of nearly 15.
Rossellini, meanwhile, is the daughter of screen icon Ingrid Bergman, who instilled in her from a young age her call to acting.
“My mom, Ingrid Bergman, was an actress, and my mom always talked about the fact that she didn’t choose acting, acting chose her. She had to act,” she explained. “She had four children and it was very difficult for her to be a mother and have this big career, and people say, ‘Why don’t you stop and take care of your children and then maybe later on be an actress?’ She couldn’t. She had to act. It was a calling.”
Rossellini found a connection between her mother’s calling and that of being a nun from her time in Catholic school as a child, which she drew upon for “Conclave.”
“When I asked my nun at school how her family reacted when she decided to be a nun, she said it was terrible. They all cried. They wanted to have grandchildren. They said, ‘Can’t you just marry and go to church every day? What’s the difference?’ She said, ‘I couldn’t. I had to be a nun. It was a calling.’ She used exactly my mom’s word,” she said.
Rossellini continued, revealing her inspiration for her “Conclave” character: “Both my mom and the nuns were very strong, independent women that made the choice they wanted to live, and a lot of other mothers that I’ve met, they hadn’t really lived the life they wanted to live. They lived a life because they were dedicated to their husband or the children, but they hadn’t fully lived their life the way my mother did and the nuns did.”
Madison said that thanks to director Sean Baker, she felt freedom to play her character of Anora, a sex worker who gets married to the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch and ends up in a whirlwind where nearly everyone around her dismisses her. It comes to a head in the film’s final scene, which Madison said was tricky to nail on the day.
The actress said she was “very nervous” about the final scene, saying she “put a lot of pressure on myself because I loved the character and that’s a moment where she is finally able to release this pain that she’s been holding onto, all of this anger, frustration. Holding the weight of all of the horrible ways that people have treated her just because of what she does for a living and who she is. It’s so unfair, and I wanted to do her justice.”
Madison said they tried to shoot the scene a number of times but technical issues kept interrupting. She finally stepped outside the car to “center myself in some way” and hit upon an idea to make her feel as vulnerable as Anora does in that scene.
“It was like, I think I need to unlock some personal memory from my life as Michaela to try to get to this emotional state that that she should be in, to release that emotion,” she said. “And so there’s this old voicemail I have that my dad sent me from years ago, and I don’t listen to it often, but I do have it saved.”
She proceeded to play the voicemail – an extremely private memory – in front of Baker and her co-star Yura Borisov. “It created this intimacy between all three of us.”
Watch the full Visionaries conversation between Rossellini and Madison in the video above.
