In her first-time hosting stint at Saturday Night Live, Oscar winner Mikey Madison cheekily hit back at critics who didn’t believe she learned how to pole dance for her stripper dramedy Anora — with a jacked alter ego who took her spot.
“I performed all my own stunts for the film, including all the dancing, so it does kind of bother me when people assume it wasn’t actually me on the pole, ’cause it was. I can prove it right now,” she began in closing her opening monologue. Saying she hadn’t “done this in a minute” to audible audience excitement and whoops, the stage then quickly transitioned to show a muscular person in Madison’s same dress doing handstand pushups and scaling the pole like a jungle gym.
The actress opened the late-night show by saying she had a “crazy month” following Anora‘s five Oscar wins, “so in April I’m going to bed.”
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She continued, “As you can tell, I have a pretty relaxed vibe in real life, and I try to incorporate that into all my roles,” cuing up a highlight reel featuring her in Anora, cursing and kicking and screaming; her being incinerated by Leonardo DiCaprio in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood; being shot and then falling into an open stove flame in Scream 5. “Just to clarify, those were two different characters who were lit on fire, and that’s range.”
As a “very proud, self-proclaimed horse girl,” Madison also poked fun at her couple’s costume with horse Thumbelina as a child: “We were jailbirds arrested for the crime of stealing each other’s hearts. I know, it’s so hard to believe I was homeschooled, right?”
She also joked about the lack of a resemblance between her and her twin brother. In a lineup of three other brunettes, he stood out as the sole redhead: “If you guessed the one who looks like Ron Weasley on testosterone, you win!”
Harking back to her background and getting in on a longtime X joke, she added, “I kind of feel like horseback riding prepared me for doing Anora, but instead of riding horses I was riding a Russian twink.”
Watch the monologue below:
Mikey Madison’s monologue! pic.twitter.com/1NUXUxrn3O
— Saturday Night Live – SNL (@nbcsnl) March 30, 2025
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