Incredible Women Of 2025: The Actors

Best Actress Oscar and Bafta winner, and Golden Globes and Sag nominee, Mikey Madison has been a thrilling figure of this awards season. The 25-year-old’s stunning, singular performance as the titular character, Ani, in Sean Baker’s Anora (about a New York sex worker who marries the degenerate son of a Russian oligarch before her dream life fast dissolves) garnered widespread critical acclaim, as well as being the big winner at this year’s Academy Awards. When she took to the stage to accept her Bafta, she concluded by paying a powerful tribute to the sex-worker community, saying: “You deserve respect and human decency. I will always be a friend and ally, and I urge others to do the same.” While it is Anora that has propelled Madison’s star to the stratosphere, she had an eclectic range of projects under her belt already – including the comedy series Better Things, Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and the 2022 Scream sequel. So, when the red carpets, speeches and celebrations of statuette season are over, the question on everyone’s lips will be: what will we see Madison do next?

For her lead role in 2024’s coming-of-age movie Suncoast (opposite Laura Linney and Woody Harrelson), Nico Parker won the Sundance Special Jury Award for Breakthrough Performance. Prior to that, her role call included the first season of HBO’s apocalypse drama The Last Of Us, for which she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the Bafta TV Awards, and the sci-fi film Reminiscence, which saw her work with her mother, Thandiwe Newton. Parker is set to cement her name even deeper in 2025, with a few high-profile projects added to her portfolio. In the hit rom-com sequel Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy, she appears alongside Renée Zellweger, Hugh Grant, Leo Woodall and Chiwetel Ejiofor, playing the titular character’s all-too-capable Gen-Z nanny. Then she has a lead in the live-action remake of How to Train Your Dragon dropping this summer – and is currently shooting Maude Apatow’s directorial feature-film debut, the whip-smart comedy Poetic License.

Few breakthrough projects have prompted quite as much conversation and debate as Sophie Wilde’s has done – playing the bold, eagle-eyed assistant to CEO Romy (Nicole Kidman) in Halina Reijn’s erotic thriller, Babygirl. “It was honestly such a dream to work with both Halina and Nicole,” the Australian actor tells us of the experience. “They are such powerhouses of their craft – and to be able to watch that in real time is something I don’t take for granted. They’ve both in their own ways imparted so much knowledge to me – and helped me grow as a performer. That and… they are just fucking cool people!” Wilde has been making waves for a while, having appeared in crime drama You Don’t Know Me and acclaimed A24 horror Talk To Me, leading the coming-of-age Netflix show Everything Now, and in 2024 she was nominated for the Bafta Rising Star Award. This year, she stars in action-adventure film Watch Dogs, alongside Tom Blyth, and is also signed on for Alejandro Iñárritu’s highly-anticipated, currently untitled new project – which has Tom Cruise and Jesse Plemons attached, too – so it’s safe to say that Wilde is on a sky-high ascent.

From her star-turn as Daphne Sullivan in The White Lotus season two (which earned her an Emmy nod and, incidentally, is how she met her now-boyfriend, actor Leo Woodall) to the ill-fated Merritt Monaco in Netflix’s The Perfect Couple, Meghann Fahy has a penchant for playing characters with a charismatic charm and a secret or two – in the midst of intense drama and paradisal locations. Fahy’s slate of upcoming projects is an exciting mix: starring in Max Walker-Silverman’s heart-wrenching Rebuilding, alongside Josh O’Connor, and the new Blumhouse mystery-horror Drop, playing a widowed mother who comes under terrifying threat when she goes on her first date in years. Fahy also has the TV series Sirens, a dark comedy courtesy of Maid creator Molly Smith Metzler, set over one tumultuous weekend at a lavish beachside estate. It co-stars Julianne Moore, Kevin Bacon and Milly Alcock and is produced by Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap production company. Working with Moore proved to be a career highlight, Fahy tells us: “The ease with which she grounds a scene or drops into a moment with such precision, and beyond that, the way she treats everyone else around her… As a woman in this industry, it’s really inspiring to see someone be so in their power while also having such respect for everyone on set.” Another dream collaborator would be Kate Winslet, but her biggest inspirations come from closer to home. “My nieces are a never-ending source of hope and inspiration in my life,” she says. “The more time I spend with them, the more I feel grounded in a version of a world that I want to be my reality.”

Presenting season 9 of the Incredible Women podcast: Passion & Purpose

The Oscars 2025: everything you need to know