Madison Iseman

The Move That Changed Everything

Madison Iseman arrived in Los Angeles at seventeen with a suitcase full of failed auditions. She didn't come from a family of performers and had no contacts in the California industry. In 2013, her reality consisted of landing commercial castings while finishing her studies remotely.

Her luck changed with a series on the cable network CMT.

In 2016, she landed the role of Charlotte in Still the King. That comedy alongside Billy Ray Cyrus gave her the experience she needed to understand the rhythm of a professional set. But the real engine of her visibility wasn't cable television; it was a multimillion-dollar franchise.

The phone call that came from the jungle

Her big break came in 2017 with the relaunch of Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. Playing Bethany, the popular girl trapped in the body of a middle-aged cartographer, required a comedic ability that few expected from a new face.

It was a worldwide box office hit that grossed more than $960 million. That figure pulled her out of obscurity from low-budget teen series.

And it worked.

From there, horror came knocking persistently. In 2019, she starred in Annabelle Comes Home as Mary Ellen. The shoot was physically exhausting due to long night shifts at the Warner Bros. studios, and the actress performed most of her stunt scenes without doubles.

Blood, screams and golden armor

Iseman took on the challenge of leading the television version of I Know What You Did Last Summer for Amazon Prime Video in 2021. She had to play two twin sisters with opposing personalities. The acting effort was immense, because she filmed scenes opposite herself for fourteen hours a day on locations in Hawaii.

But the series was canceled after just one season.

In 2023, she stepped into the role of Sienna in the live-action adaptation of Knights of the Zodiac. The production had a budget of $60 million and was shot mainly in Hungary. Critics were harsh on the script but praised her physical presence in the real-action sequences.

For the shoot of Witchboard in 2024, she worked under director Chuck Russell. It's a reinvention of the cult classic from the 1980s, where the dramatic weight falls squarely on her shoulders. So she spent months studying the original material to step away from the performance in the 1986 film.

The actress prefers shooting on real locations rather than green screens. During the filming of The Surfer in 2024, she shared the set with Nicolas Cage in Western Australia. The distribution deal for North America was closed at the Cannes Film Festival for an amount that exceeded the production company's initial projections.