Colin Farrell, nominated for his unrecognisable turn in DC series The Penguin, has won the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) award for outstanding performance by a male actor in a television movie or limited series at a lively, often surprising ceremony in Los Angeles. As was the case when he took a Golden Globe for the same performance in The Penguin in January, Farrell proved himself a master at the podium.
“The Actor goes to the man who gave me Covid at the Golden Globes,” Jamie Lee Curtis mysteriously announced (the statuette is indeed dubbed the “Actor”). “Guilty as charged, but Brendan Gleeson f**king gave it to me, so I was just spreading the love,” Farrell said when he reached the stage. “The annoying thing about what we do is it’s just unquantifiable. It’s playtime. You don’t get to fully grow up. You get to kind of keep the dream of a child alive, to try to figure out what it is to be human. And it’s so much fun.” He thanked his whole family, closing with a particularly moving tribute. “And the two people in my life who have made my life so much more special and so much more meaningful and so much more joyful than I ever truly thought possible: my son James and my son Henry.”
[ Screen Actors Guild awards 2025: Full list of winnersOpens in new window ]
The SAG Awards, presented by the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), is the last big ceremony before the Academy Awards. The Oscar voting has already closed but, given that the actors branch is the largest in that electorate, these awards traditionally give some indication of who is up and who is down. And there were some big upsets.
Sean Baker’s Anora, the current favourite for best picture at the Oscars, lost out to Conclave, Edward Berger’s thriller about the selection of a new pope, in the race for outstanding performance by a cast in a motion picture. It now looks as if that title, after a best film win at Bafta, really could challenge Baker’s wild screwball comedy at the awards that matter most.
The closest race in the end stages of Oscar season has been that for best actress, with Demi Moore, resurgent in horror satire The Substance, duking it out with Mikey Madison, electric in Anora. Farrell was back on stage to give the prize to a delighted Demi Moore. After losing to Madison at Bafta and at the Independent Spirit Awards, the veteran actor is now again maybe a nose ahead of her younger rival. “What we believe is so much more powerful than what we think,” Moore said. “The saying is I’ll believe it when I see it. But the reality is, when I believe it, I will see it. And I am so grateful for this.”
There was also a shake-up in best actor with Timothée Chalamet, who plays Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, getting past favourite Adrien Brody, who has won almost everywhere else for The Brutalist. “The classiest thing would be to downplay the effort that went into this role and how much this means to me,” he said. “But the truth is this was five and a half years of my life.”
Zoë Saldaña weathered the storm of controversy around Emilia Pérez to take the prize for best supporting female actor in a film. “I am proud to be part of a union that allows me to be who I am,” she said defiantly. Kieran Culkin, who has won everywhere in best supporting actor for A Real Pain, predictably triumphed here also.
Back in TV, Nicola Coughlan, nominated in outstanding performance by a female actor in a drama series for Bridgerton, couldn’t get past Anna Sawai, star of the awards juggernaut that is Shogun. Hiroyuki Sanada, from the same show, took the equivalent prize for male actor. Coughlan and her fellow cast members also fell to Shogun in the race for best ensemble in a drama series.
Shorter and less bombastic than the Oscars, SAG, presented in 2025 by a relaxed Kristen Bell, is always a pleasant way of spending two hours. This year’s ceremony, in between gushy tributes to the art of acting, managed respectful celebration of Los Angeles, following the wild fires that caused so much mayhem earlier in the year. The star of the evening was surely Jane Fonda. She made her way, at 87, steadily to the stage and then confirmed that her energy is entirely undimmed with the first great resistance speech of the second Trump age. “We must not isolate. We must stay in community,” she said. “We must help the vulnerable. We must find ways to project an inspiring vision of the future, one that is beckoning, welcoming.”
Farrell beat fellow Irish actor Andrew Scott, nominated in the same category for Ripley, to his Actor, but his fellow Dubliner had already bagged gold over the weekend. On Saturday, Scott won best supporting actor at the Berlin Film Festival for his performance as Richard Rodgers, the legendary musical-theatre composer, in Richard Linklater’s well-reviewed Blue Moon.
The Berlin Film Festival is, with Cannes and Venice, regarded as one of the “big three” European Film Festivals. There was further good news for Irish cinema with Brendan Canty’s Christy, a taut social-realist drama set in Cork, taking the Grand Prix for best film in the Generation 14plus section. Danny Power and Diarmuid Noyes star as two estranged brothers struggling through a difficult summer on the north side of Cork City. “The director’s deep bond with the community shines through and makes every frame feel alive and fresh,” the Jury statement said. This is the section in which, three years ago, An Cailín Ciúin won a prize on its way to an Oscar nomination.
