Some powerful SAG moments

Emotional victory

LOS ANGELES, Jan 22, (AP): While actors are accustomed to being on camera, not every starry moment at the Screen Actors Guild Awards makes the screen. Here’s a look at some of the celebrity exchanges that took place off-camera:

First, Sterling K. Brown was jumping for joy. Then he couldn’t stop crying.

Brown was a double winner at the Screen Actors Guild Awards Saturday, taking acting honors for his performance in “This is Us” and sharing in the show’s ensemble award.

Brown jumped up and down in the Shrine Auditorium ballroom when the NBC drama was announced as the ensemble winner, but by the time he came offstage after costar Milo Ventimiglia’s acceptance speech, he was in tears.

Brown dabbed at his eyes with a tissue as his cast mates congratulated each other off-camera. At times he appeared to be sobbing.

Meanwhile, co-star Chrissy Metz was singing a little ditty and dancing around.

Brown

Excited

“We did it guys!” she said. “This is exciting! I’m excited!”

The cast piled into an adjacent room where they claimed their actor statuettes, where 10-year-old Faithe Herman remarked, “These weigh like 3,000 pounds.”

When Mandy Moore spotted Brown with his two trophies, she said, “You could do bicep curls.”

Brown said backstage that he was especially moved by the cast award.

“My cast has been so generous in celebrating me and this wonderful journey that I’ve been on, and tonight we get a chance to celebrate each other,” he said. “So this is a dream... We were all waiting for them to say ‘Handmaid’s Tale,’ but then they called our network television drama! The fact that we get a chance to come, and we won? This is a very special night.”

Allison Janney revealed her secret for playing Tonya Harding’s abusive mother in “I, Tonya.”

After winning the Screen Actors Guild award for her performance in the film, the actress said that when she had to say cruel things to Harding’s character, Janney would pretend she was saying them to herself.

“We all know our inner critics, our inner voices where we’re the meanest to ourselves, and I would sometimes imagine me talking to myself when I had to say something to (co-star) Margot (Robbie),” Janney said.

A former figure skater herself, Janney said she related to LaVona Golden as she recalled her own parents waking up early to take her to the skating rink before school.

“The abuse part was not easy to understand ever,” Janney said, “but to see how normal it was in her life, that was just the way they reacted with each other.”

The actress said being a part of “I, Tonya” made her sympathize with Harding in a way she hadn’t before.

Empathy

“I feel she did get a raw deal,” Janney said.

“I just have a greater empathy for her, growing up with a mother like that ... and in the figure skating community, not being embraced for who she was and not fitting in. I have real empathy for that,” she continued. “I think that’s why it resonates right now is because of those themes of class: She was poor and they felt like she didn’t fit in. She didn’t represent the refined world of figure skating. I feel a lot for her, much more than I did so when that story first broke.”

Inside the Shrine Auditorium, where the SAG Awards are presented, a line of seat-fillers stood against a black curtain, waiting for their chance to sit with the stars.

One woman carried a copy of Vanity Fair to pass the time while she awaited her opportunity.

The tables of TV and movie casts were so packed into the ballroom, seat-fillers and waiters had to shimmy sideways to get through the throng.

While commercials play during the telecast, dinner music plays in the ballroom. That’s when the actors squeezed around to mingle. Frances McDormand hugged a whole group of people, Lupita Nyong’o posed for a selfie and Olivia Munn chatted to “Veep” star Tony Hale.

And mysteriously, a dolly loaded up with about 30 pizzas passed through the ballroom and out into the hallway, leaving guests curious as to their destination.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus was on the minds of the cast of “Veep” after their win for ensemble in a comedy series.

Timothy Simons said Louis-Dreyfus has been in good spirits during her fight with cancer. “She’s incredible. She’s uniquely able to combat something like this.”

Tony Hale said she couldn’t be more generous as a co-worker.

“She sets the tone and she has just set a tone for everybody where we’re all part of a team,” he said. “Nobody’s walking on eggshells ... She has no arrogance, no entitlement.”