Timothée Chalamet accepts the Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role award for A Complete Unknown at the 31st Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards at Shrine Auditorium and Expo Hall on February 23 in Los Angeles, California. Photo / Getty Images
The 29-year-old spent five and a half years getting in the head of Bob Dylan and just became the youngest best actor winner in SAG history. Could an upset at the Academy Awards be next?
Timothée Chalamet gripped the back of his chair like a tightly wound prizefighter about to enter the ring while Lily Gladstone and Michelle Yeoh read out the names of the nominees in his category at the Screen Actors Guild Awards on Sunday.
All of his competitors for male actor in a leading role had at least 22 years on him, and perhaps enough experience to know how to mask their nerves.
Colman Domingo of Sing Sing, 55, on his second straight year of being nominated for everything and winning nothing, beamed, waved and blew kisses to the camera at the event on Sunday night local time. Daniel Craig of Queer, 56, the only one of the bunch not nominated for an Oscar, smiled warmly, too. He knew how this was going to go; Sebastian Stan will be in his slot next Sunday for The Apprentice. Ralph Fiennes of Conclave, 62, who did this dance for The English Patient in 1996 and has come up empty this awards cycle, too, slumped forward, blinking slowly with his hand over his mouth, as if hoping for the earth to open and swallow him whole.
But this prize, which holds special significance because it’s given out by fellow actors, was really between two men, and you could tell.
In one corner was Adrien Brody, 51, who’s won every major award so far this year but never got a Screen Actors Guild (SAG) award on his way to becoming the youngest-ever best actor Oscar winner for The Pianist in 2003. We all know how his story went: the 20-plus fallow years of struggling to find a footing in this business, with The Brutalist as the first truly great lead role to make use of his prodigious talents since then. He vibrated with anticipation – leaning forward and cupping his chin in his hand as his girlfriend, Georgina Chapman, massaged his shoulders.
And in the other was Chalamet, who at 29 is just nine months younger than Brody when he was in this exact position over two decades ago.
He stared ahead, motionless, until the moment when Yeoh read out his name and he suddenly jerked to attention. “Whoa! Wow!” he said to himself, before leaning over to hug his mom, then Edward Norton, as his castmates jumped to their feet, cheering. (Brody and his fellow nominees were on their feet, too, after a few seconds to process the shock.)
What followed was a speech so full of honesty and ambition that it’s taken the internet by storm – the kind of admirably shameless confessional that, if Chalamet had been able to give it before Oscar voting closed, might have sewn up that golden statue for him.
“I’ll quickly run through this,” he began after thanking his mom, a former dancer who’s worked for the labour union Actors Equity for 40 years and who raised him and his sister, Pauline (also an actor), in a high-rise with subsidised rent for artists in New York’s theatre district.
“I know the classiest thing would be to downplay how much effort went into this role and how much this means to me, but the truth is, this was five and a half years of my life. I poured everything I had into playing this incomparable artist, Mr Bob Dylan, a true American hero, and it was the honour of a lifetime playing him.”
After a few sentences of humility (saying he shared the honour with the entire cast, mentioning again how much the award meant to him, acknowledging that acting and moviemaking is subjective), he finished his speech by saying the quiet part out loud.
“The truth is, I’m really in pursuit of greatness. I know people don’t usually talk like this, but I want to be one of the greats. I’m inspired by the greats. I’m inspired by the greats here tonight. I’m as inspired by Daniel Day-Lewis, Marlon Brando and Viola Davis as I am by Michael Jordan and Michael Phelps, and I want to be up there.”
Chalamet learned guitar and played all his own songs in the movie. He’s spent a full sixth of his life embodying a man who himself felt called to be his generation’s rocker poet laureate.
So, who can fault Chalamet for absorbing some of the Dylan attitude? For being a young man with the confidence (some might call it arrogance) of youth? For rejecting the idea that he should have to wait his turn?
Walking down the SAG red carpet before the show, Chalamet was already turning heads, in a Brat-green satin shirt and custom Chrome Hearts leather suit, plus diamond bolo tie – continuing his run of what many have called “Dylan cosplay”. (It was a recreation of one of the singer’s recent outfits, with a shirt in that same neon hue.)
Chalamet’s entire press tour has felt like delightfully unhinged performance art. Befitting his age, he’s clued into internet culture and even showed up at his own look-alike contest. He went totally method as a blond Dylan in a blue-grey beanie at the New York premiere for A Complete Unknown in December – prompting everyone to search through archival photos of Dylan to figure out what he was referencing. Every outfit has too many layers, too many scarves, in the best way.
This is the guy whose three enthusiastic, silly turns hosting Saturday Night Live have spawned an entire TikTok catalogue of Timmy rapping; dancing; playing a scandalised moon; and flailing around, attached to a bungee, as a fitness instructor with Jared Leto hair. On his latest hosting gig in late January, he became the only actor other than Gary Busey – what a precedent! – to be both host and musical guest.
His Saturday Night Live monologue turns out to have been a prelude. “It’s an enormous honour going to these awards shows, it’s such a great experience, but I just keep losing! And each time, it gets harder to pretend it doesn’t sting,” he said, queuing up a series of increasingly despondent clips from 2018, when he was a best actor nominee for Call Me By Your Name. He asked the audience if he could finally read the “sad little speech” he’d had in his pocket for four years – but of course, even in his own sketch, the fake Oscar goes to Kenan Thompson.
As Sunday’s speech – the only televised speech Chalamet’s ever been able to give at an awards show – indicates, maybe he’s been masking how serious he is by being so unserious. Chalamet is now the youngest actor ever to win an SAG award for a leading role, surpassing the record set by Nicolas Cage for Leaving Las Vegas in 1996, when he was 32. He also brought his mom to the SAGs, rather than his famous girlfriend Kylie Jenner, which ensured the night’s coverage was focused on him and his words, rather than on their PDA.
Is this one win enough to vault Chalamet past Brody on Oscars night? Certainly the race just got more exciting. The SAG Awards are voted on by more than 150,000 SAG-AFTRA members, a far larger sample size than the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which as of 2024 had 10,894 confirmed members, 9905 of whom are eligible to vote.
But the actors branch is also the largest in the academy, with 1258 members, or 12.7% of the total membership. What the actors do at their own awards is usually a major sign of favour in the academy as a whole, although notably, Lily Gladstone won the SAG last year and then lost at the Oscars to Emma Stone (who was so surprised and apologetic she practically offered to give Gladstone her statue from the stage).
Brody’s narrative in this Oscars race has been one of redemption. He’d done nothing really wrong after his win for The Pianist (except for that spontaneous Halle Berry kiss upon accepting the award), but he just hadn’t got any meaty work. In every speech, he’s expressed the humility and gratitude that comes with knowing how rare moments like this are, and how lucky he is to have had not just one, but two, change-your-life roles.
But maybe the Screen Actors Guild’s enthusiasm for Chalamet indicates a lack of interest in rewarding someone who didn’t make the most of his big break, and a preponderance of interest in crowning a new megastar. Is Chalamet’s Dylan that iconic, or just a truly commendable effort by a massive talent in a movie that ever-so-slightly transcends its staid biopic genre?
Throughout the very surprising night of awards, it felt like the SAG awards were determinedly going a different direction than the Oscars. Broader appeal. Movies and TV shows that people actually watch, particularly following an election that seemed to reject everything Hollywood stands for.
Only Murders in the Building – consistently one of the more popular streaming series – beat out more “prestige” critical darlings like Hacks and The Bear, as the surprise winner for both male actor (Martin Short) and ensemble cast in a comedy series.
In the movies category, usual suspects Zoe Saldaña of Emilia Pérez and Kieran Culkin of A Real Pain won their respective categories for actor in a supporting role as they’ve done at every awards show this season. But the lead categories seemed to go to the most commercially viable actors of the bunch. Demi Moore took home female actor in a motion picture for The Substance over this year’s breakthrough discovery, Mikey Madison of Anora.
Chalamet may be the young guy, but he’s also the one who starred in a little movie called Dune: Part Two this year, and whose Dylan biopic was distributed by Searchlight, which is owned by Disney and has grossed US$109 million ($190m) globally.
And then came the other big surprise of the night. Conclave, the pulpy papal thriller (starring Fiennes and distributed by Focus Features, which is owned by Universal) took the award for best ensemble in a motion picture. This comes days after the film broke US$100 million at the global box office. It’s the SAG equivalent of best picture, and when Harrison Ford read the film’s name, the audience was so stunned it seemed like the applause and standing ovation were happening in slow motion. Even Fiennes, speaking for the cast, of whom only four were in attendance, seemed flummoxed.
Indie films like Anora and The Brutalist – both of which have plenty of admirers in the academy, which has taken pains in recent years to become more diverse and international – took home not a single award at the SAGs.
So, what does this mean? Probably not much for Anora vs Conclave vs The Brutalist for best picture. Anora is still the Oscars frontrunner, having won the bulk of industry-voted awards. Winning the SAG (and the top prize at the Bafta awards last weekend) just means Conclave has moved into striking distance. Its pesky problem is that it wasn’t nominated for best director – and only six films in academy history have ever won for picture without a director nod: Wings in 1929, Grand Hotel in 1932, Driving Miss Daisy in 1990, Argo in 2013, Green Book in 2019 and CODA in 2022.
On the other hand, an SAG win for Chalamet definitely means something. Brody should be worried and Chalamet should be drafting up another sad little speech. He may have to sit on it for another four years, but his odds just got much better.
The Hollywood star is 70 but has no plans to retire from acting.