The Stripper on the Big Stage
Luna Sofía Miranda on Sex Work, Acting and Getting Cast in Sean Baker’s 'Anora'
Luna Sofía Miranda auditioned for grad school, but when she did not get in, the 25-year-old felt lost — unsure of her future in acting and in need of money. Miranda went to the club Pumps to pay off her debts, where director Sean Baker and producer Samantha Quan scouted her. Two years later, Miranda would be walking the red carpet at Cannes following her role in their award-winning film “Anora.”
Miranda was not on schedule the night spouses Baker and Quan sat down at Pumps, looking to talk to another dancer for their upcoming film. But she picked up an extra shift and pushed past her reluctance to approach the couple who, unbeknownst to her, were the filmmaking power duo.
“I didn't want to talk to them, because I had a really bad experience with a couple that was just being impossible,” Miranda says. They got to talking about filmmaking, with Baker assuming Miranda did not know his movies. True to her love of the craft, she knew them all.
“If I had not failed all my grad school auditions, I would never have gone to Pumps, and I would have never met Sean and Sammy,” Miranda says. “It literally feels like divine intervention.”
Miranda, a Brooklyn native, plays the character Lulu in the film about the titular Anora, the dancer who marries the son of a Russian zillionaire she meets at the club as the only girl working who speaks Russian. They tie the knot in Vegas, which is when shit hits the fan. Lulu is Anora’s best friend and the only person in the film who truly has her back. Her character is funny and endearing, as she pops up by Anora’s side in different colored wigs and says things like: “Are my tits off?” Miranda improvised most of her scenes with Mikey Madison, who plays Anora. While Madison acts the part of a Brooklyn girl, Miranda is one, and their friendship influenced the thick, nasally accent Madison pulls off.
“Luna specifically had a voice that I really liked, and I think that when we were working together, it was almost like we brought it out of each other even just a little bit more, which was cute,” Madison said while breaking down one of the movie’s scenes for Vanity Fair.
“I am hoping and praying that people see this film and their takeaway is that sex workers deserve kindness and consideration and respect,” Miranda says about “Anora.” “Sex workers represent this gray area in culture and people project their fears, their desires, their hopes and dreams onto [them] … Madison created this amazing character, Anora. I really hope that this film is a watershed moment for the sex worker community because it's a community that is hurting badly right now, a community that needs to be seen.”
Upon reading Miranda’s Vulture interview alongside other strippers whom Baker cast, I felt an instant connection to her1: the woman who knew Baker’s films when he thought she would not, a fellow New Yorker and self-described “hard hustler.” The pull I felt towards her was not misguided. She attended SUNY New Paltz, where I am finishing undergrad, and one can trace a line from her time on campus to her role in Anora.
Miranda always knew she wanted to be an actress. But when she could not afford to study acting at her first-choice school, she headed upstate knowing nothing about the public university close to the city. As a freshman in 2017, she saw girls in sparkling tights and lace corsets at a student fair. They were the students of Alpha Psi Ecdysia, the now-defunct burlesque troupe, that Miranda felt drawn to. “I was like, ‘Oh my god. I want to be with the hoes,’” she says.
As Miranda got to know the girls, she learned how outside of the troupe, some of them worked in strip clubs. When the senior girls learned of her money problems, they told her to come to with them and start making money.
The 19-year-old Miranda did, but dancing while working towards a degree was not easy.
“When I was dancing at New Paltz, it was a secret. The weight of it was too much for me,” she says. “I did not have what it took to be a stripper until a couple years later.”
When Miranda returned to stripping after the pandemic in 2022, she says something clicked. “The world almost ended, and I don't give a fuck anymore.” She stopped hiding her lifestyle and being open about her work made it easier to do.
Anora took home the Palme d’Or at Cannes, the festival’s highest honor. Miranda says the price of the trip to France cost “800 lap dances,” but was worth it to further her acting career. She looked like a mermaid on the red carpet, in a matching blue wig and dress like the sea. Along with her fellow sex workers cast in the film, she wore a pair of clear, glowing pleasers — heels designed for pole dancing — in an unabashed celebration of who they are and the world they come from. A world according to Miranda, that is indifferent to the prestige of red carpets and the Palme d’Or. “People at the strip club, they don't care. That holds no weight in that environment,” she says.
“Cannes in particular was painful, because it's such an exclusive event ... It's kind of hard to live this fantasy knowing I have to come back to being a working girl.”
It is not easy to balance the mental and physical demands of sex work while pursuing a career in acting. “I have one foot in Hollywood and one foot in the strip club, and my sleep cycle is a disaster,” she says.
But Miranda’s prowess in the world of sex work poises her to prosper in Hollywood’s cutthroat environment. After all, strippers and actors orbit on similar wavelengths. Both careers involve selling an image of oneself, with physical and emotional demands that take a toll on the body. And no one knows how to hustle more than a girl from the club.
“When you're a sex worker, no one is coming to save you.” Miranda says. “Most sex workers know that if you want something, you go and get it yourself, and that can be a harsh realization. It’s also been the best thing ever, because I know now that I can teach myself how to do anything.”
Miranda did just this in 2018 for Liminal Spaces, the short film she fundraised, learned how to produce and run a professional set all on her own. "Being a stripper gave me the confidence,” she says. "When you're a sex worker, you're an entrepreneur. You're a business person. You have to keep your books organized. You have to keep all your receipts. It's a lot of work managing the business side of being a sex worker, and I feel like film production was the same.”
As Miranda looks to her post-“Anora” future, she does not want to stop doing sex work but hopes to start paying the bills with acting. She is shooting another indie film on Halloween with a director she met at Cannes and plays a character she says is “wild and kind of ditzy.”
The young stripper and actress supporting her dreams has no plans to compromise either part of her identity. “The fight of my life is going to be destigmatizing sex work in the arts, because nobody makes money doing art, and it should be totally acceptable for an actress or a journalist or a painter to do sex work to support herself,” she says.
“The conversation around sex work has been sex workers deserve respect, and it needs to go beyond that. Sex workers deserve that their dreams come true. They deserve to be happy. They deserve to tell their own stories.”
Luna’s willingness to speak to me — a student journalist — for my diy blog is a testament to her generosity and kindness <3