It’s a very familiar Hollywood pattern: A young star rises in the indie scene, has a major, possibly unexpected bout of critical success… and then throws themselves into the waiting, and very lucrative, maw of franchise blockbuster filmmaking. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with it—you can’t buy a new house with an Oscar—but it can be a bit dispiriting to see an exciting new talent be forced to mold themselves to the machine, just as they’re coming into their own.
But not Mikey Madison, turns out. The Anora star/Best Actress winner has reportedly just turned down a chance to tell someone else to never tell her the odds (and/or your preferred Star Wars nostalgia line of choice), with Variety reporting that Madison has passed on Shawn Levy’s upcoming movie set in that galaxy wot’s so long and far away. This, despite the fact that starring in Levy’s Star Wars, set to arrive sometime after The Mandalorian And Grogu bring the franchise back to theaters for the first time this decade, would have reportedly teamed her up with Ryan Gosling, who’s actually done a pretty good job of threading the line between blockbuster work and more dramatically interesting material over the years .
Very little is known about Levy’s Star Wars movie, except, now, for the fact that it will be extremely Mikey Madison-free. (Levy is, himself, in something like victory lap mode at the moment, albeit from a more commercial direction; he’s fresh off making Disney a billion bucks with Deadpool & Wolverine, which is the kind of things that gets you access to the Star Wars keys.) Worth noting that Madison has already done her time in the genre film mines, having previously appeared in Scream, and gotten her faced bashed in with a can of dog food at the climax of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood. Everyone’s currently watching to see what she’ll do with her newfound cultural cachet—except, presumably, for Shawn Levy, who’ll have to find another Best Actress winner to star in his Star Wars movie. (And now we’re going to spend the rest of the day amusing ourselves at the thought of him calling up 2024 winner Emma Stone to stage a La La Land reunion in space.)
