SAG Awards 2023: Brendan Fraser gets emotional as he wins Best Actor for The Whale
Brendan Fraser got choked up while he accepted the Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role in a Motion Picture honour at Sunday night’s Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards held at Los Angeles’ Fairmont Century Plaza.
The 54-year-old delivered an emotional speech after Jessica Chastain handed him the gong for his turn in Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale.
Fraser beat out Austin Butler, Colin Farrell, Adam Sandler and Bill Nighy to walk away with the honour.
Overcome with emotion, Fraser first quipped: “I’m smiling and breathing, that’s half the job.”
He then added: “I will treasure this, but never more than how I treasured… my SAG card that I earned in 1991.
“It made me feel like I belonged. We’re actors, we all want to belong to a tribe, and that’s where I found that.
“If you told that guy back then that I’d be standing right here right now, I would not have believed you.”
The Oscar nominee went on to thank his The Whale co-stars Hong Chau and Sadie Sink as well as the film’s director Aronofsky and writer Samuel D Hunter.
Speaking of his character Charlie in the film, the actor continued: “He’s someone who is on a raft of regrets, but he’s in a sea of hope.
“I’ve been in that sea, and I’ve rode that wave lately, and it’s been powerful and good, and I’ve also had that wave smash me into the ocean floor.”
Screen Actors Guild Awards (SAG) 2023
Elsewhere, Everything Everywhere All At Once stars Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan made history by becoming the first Asian actors to win top film prizes at the star-studded event.
Yeoh became the first Asian actor to win Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role in a Motion Picture, while Quan took home Best Supporting Actor at the ceremony on Sunday for their turns in the sci-fi thriller, which sees a family torn apart by an interdimensional rift.
Quan is only the second Asian male actor to win any individual SAG prize in either film or television, one year after Squid Game’s Lee Jung-Jae won the prize for male actor in a drama series.
