This is the first year of the newly renamed Actor’s Awards, but for the acclaimed awards formerly known as the SAG Awards, Sunday’s ceremony was all about music. The 32nd Actor Awards featured a live band for the first time, led by music director Ricky Minor, and several musical performances.
“This is our third year with Netflix, and we want to increase the amount a little bit each year,” said Mark Bracco, executive producer of SAG-AFTRA and Silent House Productions, which produces the acting awards. “Last year, we really wanted to bring more fun and more comedy into the show. A big goal this year was to bring even more music into the show.”
And they did just that, with host Kristen Bell initiating a title change from the SAG Awards to Actor of the Year and performing an opening number with an original number that poked fun at celebrity name changes. “Sinners” star Myles Caton then performed a version of “This Little Light of Mine” from the movie. Miner and his band then added live music throughout the night.
Showrunner and executive producer John Brockett said, “It felt so good to have something so solid and authentic in the room and to have real music playing.” “That was music to my ears, so I’d like to apologize in advance for saying this.”
Fellow Silent House Prods EP member Linda Gielern added: “Ricky is so professional and brings so much life and energy to it. So having live music in the room is a total game changer.”
Variety interviewed Brockett (who added “showrunner” to his duties for the first time this year), Bracco, and Gielan before the acting awards ceremony to learn more about what they had planned that night and why they were banned. Now you can share it.
The cold open for “Abbott Elementary” follows the actor’s previous work on “Ted Lasso” and “Hux.” In this case, “Abbott” creator and star Quinta Branson was involved in formulating the idea.
“We pitched the idea to them. We call it ‘Flip the Script.’ It’s something we’ve wanted to do for a while,” Brockett said. “And[Branson]just bit it and ran with it. They’re so busy that we had some people on our awards team help us come up with ideas to pull out the actual bits. But they ran with it, came up with the script and the entire shoot, scheduled it on stage and executed it.”
When getting the stars of “Abbott” to excitedly talk about the TV and film projects for which the actors were nominated, Branson came up with the idea using Sheryl Lee Ralph’s Barbara as an entry point. Because Barbara always confuses pop culture references with celebrity names.
“My favorite was Mr. Johnson the janitor. His favorite movie was ‘Bugonia,'” Bracco said. “You can hear it in their voices, because they’re all just in the break room. And to me, that’s kind of what people do at work. They sit around and talk about their favorite movies and TV shows. They totally embraced it and we just shot last week, so it just went by so fast.”
This year’s signature openers for “I’m an Actor” included Kristen Wiig, Delroy Lindo, Michael J. Fox, Teyana Taylor and Kate Hudson.
“It was a really great, eclectic lineup of people, and their stories ranged from really funny to really moving,” Bracco said. “I think people look forward to this every year.”
Getty Images
Host Kristen Bell enlisted the help of a songwriter friend to create an original opening song, “A Stage Name.”
The idea for another opening number came after last year’s show, where Bell opened with “Do You Want to Be an Actor,” a play on the “Frozen” song “Do You Want to Build a Snowman.” (Bell referred to “back to the well” when introducing this bit.)
“She was inspired by the idea of the show being renamed, and reached out to some of her songwriter friends to come up with an original song based on some of the names she suggested for actors who had changed their names, or names that she thought the actors should change their names to,” Bracco said. “It was informative for everyone in the audience, and it was very funny. Some of the name suggestions are completely ridiculous, which is great. We’re kind of poking fun at ourselves a little bit, but we’re also leaning into the name change.”
Brockett said, “My favorite name change idea was to make Jesse Plemons into Jesse Primes, like lemons and limes. It literally made me laugh out loud.”
Getty Images
Myles Caton was tapped to perform a special rendition of “This Little Light of Mine” after producers saw his performance in Sinners.
“One of the things that was really important to us was to make sure that the musical numbers that we perform remained in the DNA of our show,” Brockett said. “So a performance in a nominated film or TV show made the most sense for us. This year, one of the ideas was to bring in Myles Caton for this. When I was listening to the soundtrack for ‘Sinners’ There was a moment when Miles came out and sang an acoustic version of ‘This Little Light of Mine.’ It was so beautiful. It made me feel every emotion I’ve ever felt.
Incidentally, the opening soloist for this song was Cayton’s 11-year-old cousin, CJ. “It’s very beautiful,” Brockett said.
Bell came up with the idea of having his friends, including Ted Danson, Jackie Torn, Ike Barinholtz, and Jacobi Jupe, run a “Marty Supreme”-style table tennis tournament behind the scenes.
At the “1st Kristen Bell Actor Awards Sports Championship,” a trophy that Bell made herself appeared.
“We love runners, and Kristen is the same way,” Brockett said. “It’s like there’s a through line.”
“We fleshed out everything together. But she wanted to do it. And she said, ‘I want a goofy trophy,'” Bracco added. So we said, “Okay, let’s go out. Do you want us to buy the kids’ soccer trophies and put a picture of Timothy on it?” And she said, “No, I’m going to make the trophy.” And she did. I don’t know when she’ll have time to do something like that, but she got the trophy and it’s ridiculous.”
Getty Images
The writers of “The Pit” came up with fake medical dialogue that host Bell didn’t look at before attempting to read it out loud on the show.
“We coordinated this through Warner Bros. Television, and the word from Noah Wyle was that it was going to be very difficult,” Bracco said.
This year, the stage rotates 90 degrees, giving you even more room for all sorts of antics.
“There wasn’t a bad seat in the house,” Gillan said. Brockett added: “That allowed us to form a house band. If we hadn’t turned the room around, we wouldn’t have even had room for a house band before.”
Variety (via Getty Images)
Mindy Kaling helped organize a reunion for the female cast of “The Office” at the awards ceremony.
“Mindy Kaling has kind of become a pseudo-talent booker for our show,” Bracco said. “We reached out to her about being a presenter, and she came back with the idea of doing a reunion with all the women from The Office, and we were like, ‘Yeah!’ Within an hour or so, she texted all the reservations and basically booked them all. So she was texting Jenna Fischer, Angela Kinsey, Ellie Kemper and, no joke, within 90 minutes they were all booked and on the show.”
Netflix had limited commercial time this year, so producers filled it with four special packages about medical dialogue, physical comedy, troublemaker characters, and the art of rom-coms.
“They went into a commercial break, and we went back into the show with them from the commercial break, and they kind of complimented different genre acting and different types of acting angles,” Brockett said.
