BEST IN SHOW
Ahead of tomorrow’s Emmy Awards, Nicholas Fonseca looks back at the most shocking, moving and surprising moments
In 2018, Glenn Weiss was
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accepting his award for directing, erm, that year’s Academy Awards telecast (only at the Emmys, folks!) when he gave a shout-out to girlfriend Jan Svendsen during his speech, saying, “You wonder why I don’t like to call you my girlfriend? Because I want to call you my wife.” To gasps and cheers, he called her onstage and asked her to marry him – with a ring that belonged to his mum, who had died less than three weeks prior. She said yes, audiences sighed with relief and the moment went viral.
Nicole Kidman celebrated
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co-star Alexander Skarsgård’s win for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited Series for Big Little Lies in 2017 by tenderly kissing him – and in front of her husband Keith Urban, no less. Confronted about the moment weeks later by UK TV host Graham Norton, she brushed off the controversy:
“I did kiss him, but you have to understand… I did everything with Alex.”
That same year, a rare
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reunion between co-stars Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda and Dolly Parton took place onstage. Parton, ever the nonpartisan, slyly refused to join in with her far more political friends’ comments about then-US President Donald Trump by making a joke about
(what else?) her bosom – but took heat from some fans for appearing alongside them, anyway.
Mad Men may be
one of TV’s most lauded series of all time, but only one of its stars ever earned an acting
Emmy
– and it took him
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no less than eight tries. In 2015, Jon Hamm nabbed his long-awaited Outstanding Lead
Actor in a Drama Series trophy, and playfully crawled across the stage to accept it.
Well, this was 5 just weird. After Modern Family star Sofía Vergara introduced then-Academy of Television Arts & Sciences
chairperson Bruce Rosenblum in 2014, he gave a speech touting the body’s commitment to diversity while she… stood on a rotating pedestal and struck a series of poses that showed off, well, her body. She later defended the gimmick (“Somebody can be hot and also be funny and make fun of herself… lighten up a bit”) but plenty took umbrage, including journalist Katie Couric, who tweeted, “I love Sofía Vergara but did anyone find that schtick somewhat offensive?”
In a clip that Will & Grace 6 star Megan Mullally has since made clear she wishes could be scrubbed from the internet, she appeared onstage at the 2006 show in character as Karen Walker to sing the Green Acres theme song alongside an overall-clad Donald Trump, who was then just a reality TV host. Ah, simpler times…
In 2005, just four months
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after the infamous Vanity Fair cover-shoot fiasco that made global headlines amid rumours of in-fighting between the five female leads on Desperate Housewives, Felicity Huffman beat co-star Teri Hatcher to the Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series trophy. Tellingly, in most backstage pictures of her gleefully holding her gong, Hatcher was nowhere to be seen.
In 2002, against a murderer’s 8 row of excellent comedians, Friends star Jennifer Aniston eked out a win for Outstanding
Lead Actress in a Comedy Series. Gobsmacked, she gave an endearing speech thanking everyone from her castmates to then-husband Brad Pitt and the mysterious “Inger, craft services” – that would be Inger Johnson, who kept the show’s sextet nourished with homemade organic soups on set.
Amid heightened emotions, 9
Ellen DeGeneres hosted a postponed ceremony in 2001, less than two months after the September 11 terrorist attacks, and brought some levity by wearing a version of the “swan dress” that Bjork had made famous at the Oscars months earlier. “I guess this is business casual,” she quipped.
When Camryn Manheim 10
triumphed in the Outstanding Supporting
Actress in a Drama Series category in 1998, she ended her jubilant acceptance speech by raising the trophy aloft and yelling, “This is for all the fat girls!” Twenty years later, she considered the revolutionary nature of what she had said: “I tried to normalise it. It makes people uncomfortable. Anytime you said it, there would be a whole discussion. It was rather exhausting. ‘ You’re not fat…’
Yes, I am! I wanted to demystify the word so it wouldn’t carry negative connotations anymore.”
THE 2021 PRIMETIME EMMY AWARDS
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