Anora actor admits his notorious button-mashing scene was a win in the end

Anora is one of 2024’s big indie success stories, an Oscar hopeful after winning big at the Cannes Film Festival over the summer, and among the best films of the year. Sean Baker (The Florida Project, Red Rocket) continues his American neorealist streak by dropping into New York’s Russian-American community in Brighton Beach to see what happens when a fiercely independent stripper, Ani (Mikey Madison), falls for Ivan (Mark Eidelstein), an oligarchical party animal from the mother country. Specificity — from the texture of Brooklyn to the twenty-something speak — gives way to moments of extreme comedy and deep sadness. It’s a great movie. 

Each bit of Anora is crafted with such clear intent that one choice stood out to me as a little off — was it a moment of lapsed reality or a sublime chaotic choice? Early in the film, immediately after Ani hooks up with Ivan, the two enjoy some post-sex lounging on a giant couch in the Russian kid’s mansion. Ani soaks up the moment, lost in the glitz of Ivan’s lifestyle. Ivan, meanwhile, plays some junk Call of Duty ripoff, mashing the buttons on what appears to be a white wireless Xbox controller. He is extremely bad at it, although there’s no indication that he’s screwing up or that anyone thinks his decision to operate a two-joystick controller one stick at a time (and with his index finger and thumb, no less) makes him look like an alien in human skin. 

I was not alone in losing my damn mind over this.

Knowing Baker as a director, Ivan being a shit gamer could make perfect sense — or it could be the Gen Z equivalent of actors phoning in the guitar-playing in musical biopics. I wouldn’t blame Baker, Eidelstein, or any of Anora’s craftspeople for not prioritizing the five seconds of fake video gameplay over literally anything else in their fantastic film. But I did wonder: Was it a choice?  

Earlier this year I had the chance to speak to Madison about the spectrum of work involved with Anora, which involved embedding herself in the sex work community and learning to move like a career dancer (on top of all the emotional labor of the character work). Of course, I also had to ask about the scene in which she watched Mark pretend to play a video game. She thought he was doing well enough.

“I didn’t grow up playing them, and I haven’t been quite sucked into that world yet,” she admitted. “But I thought Mark talked about really liking video games, and he had played a lot of the games that he was playing in the film.”

Ah, the ways we embarrass ourselves in the pursuit of truth. To further understand this wonderfully weird moment in Anora, I reached out to reps for Eidelstein and Baker, who sadly declined to grant interviews related to the subject of fake video gaming in movies. 

Luckily, my dear friend Christopher Rosen of Gold Derby used some precious time with Eidelstein to get to the bottom of this. In the middle of a sprawling interview that covers many more important topics than this, Eidelstein said this was not the first he had heard about the gaming in Anora.

I sometimes receive messages from audiences for Anora that are like, ‘Hi Mark, why are you playing video games like this? It’s a shooter, why are you pushing all the buttons all the time? It’s a fake. You’re not playing really.’

And it’s partly true. Because I’m not a video game person, really. I’m not into video games. But my young brother, his name is Matvey, he is really into this. And when I asked him to play, I started to push all the buttons. And Matvey, every time, would say, ‘No, Mark, you don’t have to do this. You have to attentively push the right buttons. It’s very important. It’s a science. It’s not a game. You have to be serious in this.’  So in the movie, I thought it would be funny if I pushed all the buttons, and my brother would laugh. It was for that.

Eidelstein adds something I agree with: his choice to defy his brother’s gaming advice and look like a loon fits the character of Ivan, a reckless, immature nepo baby throwing around cash to escape his problems. 

“He’s not [meticulous],”  Eidelstein told Gold Derby. “Now I will make a strategy of how to play this game. No — he’s without a strategy. It’s just right now and everything at once.”

Eidelstein’s button-mashing has earned a place in the hall of fame of Bad Gaming in Movies, but in this case, it’s a badge of honor, an actor turning his need to “git gud” into a defining character trait. This is the magic Baker creates in Anora, a finely tailored story with room for the flickers of chaos. In this case, newb skillz.

Anora is currently in theaters and on PVOD.