Latest news with #FrancesMcDormand
The Guardian
31-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘It's the best monster ever invented': Noah Hawley on bringing Ridley Scott's Alien to TV
When it was first announced in 2013, the thought of Fargo being reimagined as a TV miniseries felt practically sacrilegious. The 1996 neo-noir starring Frances McDormand as a kindly Minnesota police chief was a singular film that had won two Oscars. Surely its distinctive Coen brothers vibe would get shredded in the woodchipper of TV adaptation? Back then, Noah Hawley, the screenwriter who took on the job, would have agreed. 'It seemed like such a terrible idea,' he says via video call from a Long Island holiday bolthole. 'Which is sort of why I liked it. The risk/reward was really high.' If his take on Fargo had sullied the original, Hawley jokes, he would have been 'burned at the stake'. But his approach was more mindful reimagining than direct adaptation, with Billy Bob Thornton and Martin Freeman leading a new small-town tale of malevolence and haplessness that perfectly captured the Coens' essence. Fargo won three Emmys in 2014 – including outstanding limited series – and has continued as a star-studded anthology for another four seasons, with showrunner Hawley finding an intriguing new angle each time. If taking on Fargo was a big swing, Hawley's latest franchise remix is a literal beast. Alien: Earth is a prequel series to the durable sci-fi franchise that began with Ridley Scott's clammy 1979 horror. Despite numerous Alien movie sequels, crossovers and spin-offs, this is the first time the hissing, nightmarish xenomorph – 'Maybe the best monster ever invented, cinematically,' Hawley suggests – has attempted to colonise TV. The approach had to be different from last year's successful offshoot Alien: Romulus, a back-to-basics slasher picking up plot threads from Scott's original. 'An Alien movie is a two-hour survival story, so the monsters can just be monsters,' says Hawley. 'But in a 10-hour, 30-hour, 50-hour show the monsters have to exist for a reason. You're also not killing everybody off, so there has to be a continuing serialised story in which the monsters fit.' With the critical acclaim that greeted Fargo and his 2017 series Legion – a subversive take on the X-Men comic-book mythos that ran for three trippy seasons – Hawley has helped elevate expectations for small-screen offshoots of existing intellectual property. 'The question is always: why are we doing this?' he says. 'And if you can't answer the 'why?' question with something other than 'money' then probably you should stop.' What used to be cash-grab brand extensions now increasingly strive to be prestige projects, as evidenced by recent blue-chip TV efforts such as HBO's The Penguin and politically charged Star Wars hit Andor. Hawley is technically on holiday when we speak: he, his artist wife Kyle and their two teenage kids have swapped the summer heat of their Austin, Texas base for New York state. The 58-year-old looks beach-ready in a casual short-sleeve shirt, but is happy to dig into the guts of his own summer blockbuster. It has been gestating since 2018 when, after the success of Legion, the FX channel asked how he might approach an Alien show. 'If you ask me if I have an idea, I'm gonna have an idea,' he says. From the lofty prequel Prometheus to a shlocky crossover in Alien vs Predator, the franchise timeline has become cluttered over the past 45 years. Hawley's pitch zeroed in on unexplored territory: what was happening on Earth in the years just before the events of Alien. The result is a mashup of Peter Pan dreaminess and heavy metal doom, with a sprawling ensemble cast including Babou Ceesay as a poker-faced security officer and Timothy Olyphant as a blond android 'synth'. It is set in 2120 – a couple of years before Sigourney Weaver and her blue-collar crew of space truckers will have their fateful close encounter – and the Earth has, rather plausibly, been carved up by a cabal of all-powerful tech corporations. Weyland-Yutani, the franchise's longstanding corporate baddy, is obviously in the mix. But a pushy rival called Prodigy has secretly cracked transhumanism, decanting consciousness into powerful synth bodies. The catch is that only young minds are flexible enough for the process, so terminally ill kids are being reborn as herculean but emotionally immature 'hybrids'. 'If you're telling a story about humanity there's nobody more human than a child,' says Hawley. 'They don't know they're bad liars, they can't pretend they're not scared and they learn to be cynical. So that was interesting to me.' When a hulking research vessel carrying unpleasant cosmic beasties crash-lands on a hi-tech city in Thailand, the hybrids are deployed on a search-and-rescue mission. 'We're fast, we're strong and we don't break,' points out lead hybrid Wendy, played with suitably childlike glee by Sydney Chandler (Pistol, Sugar). The stage is set for a corporate turf war amid a citywide state of emergency. Coming up with new aliens that could exist alongside the familiar xenomorph was 'daunting' for Hawley. The aim was to evoke the feeling of watching Alien for the first time. 'They don't have to carry the day,' he says. 'They just have to offer that feeling of unpredictability. By introducing these other creatures, I am able to give you a sense of: well, now I don't know what's going to happen.' After the fraught terrain of Fargo and Legion, where an emotional gut punch never felt far away, Alien: Earth feels like Hawley in a brasher, more swaggering mode. Classic Black Sabbath was a touchstone. 'I wanted this show to be completely entertaining from start to finish,' he says. 'It's complex and layered but it's also a cliffhanger show and you get those big feelings from hard rock and driving guitars. I want you to come out of each episode going: yeah, come on!' Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Hawley was born and grew up in New York City (he has a twin brother, Alexi, who has carved out his own career as a TV writer and producer). It was a creative household: his mother, Louise Armstrong, was a writer, painter and activist; his father trained as an actor. 'We grew up in the West Village in the 70s and 80s when the only people down there were artists,' he says. 'It was not the billionaire row that it is today.' After studying political science, Hawley worked as a paralegal while also playing in rock bands and dabbling in creative writing. At 27, he had moved to San Francisco and published his first novel. Despite getting a two-book deal he was struggling with the follow-up. 'My editor had left, and the publisher wasn't really interested in the book that I wrote,' he says, 'so I was in kind of a desperate moment.' Helping a friend refine a screenplay led to him pitching and selling his own projects: 'Within six months I went from someone who basically didn't know how I was going to keep the lights on until the end of the year to this whole other career.' He has continued to write novels in parallel with his showrunner career – his sixth, Anthem, was published in 2022 – and made his feature directorial debut in 2019 with the astronaut psychodrama Lucy in the Sky, starring Natalie Portman. If this magpie approach suggests a certain creative restlessness – he also provided vocals for Legion's spacey soundtrack of retro covers – it has also been a conscious attempt at diversifying. 'It's given me a lot of options, which as an artist translates into a modicum of control over your own destiny,' he says. One unexpected early influence is British comedy. After studying theatre in London, his father returned with Goon Show LPs that Hawley and his brother could soon recite by heart. 'I just wore those records out,' he remembers. He also devoured NPR repeats of the BBC's 1978 radio adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and enthuses about seeing The Young Ones at an impressionable age. That meant the casting of Adrian Edmondson as a sinister aide-de-camp in Alien: Earth was a real full-circle moment. 'I told Adrian that there was a moment on The Young Ones [in the episode Flood] that informs everything you need to know about me as a storyteller,' he says. 'It was when his character, Vyvyan, walked into the closet and ended up in Narnia. I must have been in my teens when I saw it and it was such a mind-blowing thing, that you could have magical realism in a comedy about roommates.' What was it like meeting his childhood hero? 'I've found with a lot of comedic actors that their downtime persona is very different. Adrian is very measured, you know.' Hawley laughs. 'He's much more like his character in our show than Vyvyan.' Alien: Earth launches 13 August on Disney+ in the UK.
The Guardian
31-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘It's the best monster ever invented': Noah Hawley on bringing Ridley Scott's Alien to TV
When it was first announced in 2013, the thought of Fargo being reimagined as a TV miniseries felt practically sacrilegious. The 1996 neo-noir starring Frances McDormand as a kindly Minnesota police chief was a singular film that had won two Oscars. Surely its distinctive Coen brothers vibe would get shredded in the woodchipper of TV adaptation? Back then, Noah Hawley, the screenwriter who took on the job, would have agreed. 'It seemed like such a terrible idea,' he says via video call from a Long Island holiday bolthole. 'Which is sort of why I liked it. The risk/reward was really high.' If his take on Fargo had sullied the original, Hawley jokes, he would have been 'burned at the stake'. But his approach was more mindful reimagining than direct adaptation, with Billy Bob Thornton and Martin Freeman leading a new small-town tale of malevolence and haplessness that perfectly captured the Coens' essence. Fargo won three Emmys in 2014 – including outstanding limited series – and has continued as a star-studded anthology for another four seasons, with showrunner Hawley finding an intriguing new angle each time. If taking on Fargo was a big swing, Hawley's latest franchise remix is a literal beast. Alien: Earth is a prequel series to the durable sci-fi franchise that began with Ridley Scott's clammy 1979 horror. Despite numerous Alien movie sequels, crossovers and spin-offs, this is the first time the hissing, nightmarish xenomorph – 'Maybe the best monster ever invented, cinematically,' Hawley suggests – has attempted to colonise TV. The approach had to be different from last year's successful offshoot Alien: Romulus, a back-to-basics slasher picking up plot threads from Scott's original. 'An Alien movie is a two-hour survival story, so the monsters can just be monsters,' says Hawley. 'But in a 10-hour, 30-hour, 50-hour show the monsters have to exist for a reason. You're also not killing everybody off, so there has to be a continuing serialised story in which the monsters fit.' With the critical acclaim that greeted Fargo and his 2017 series Legion – a subversive take on the X-Men comic-book mythos that ran for three trippy seasons – Hawley has helped elevate expectations for small-screen offshoots of existing intellectual property. 'The question is always: why are we doing this?' he says. 'And if you can't answer the 'why?' question with something other than 'money' then probably you should stop.' What used to be cash-grab brand extensions now increasingly strive to be prestige projects, as evidenced by recent blue-chip TV efforts such as HBO's The Penguin and politically charged Star Wars hit Andor. Hawley is technically on holiday when we speak: he, his artist wife Kyle and their two teenage kids have swapped the summer heat of their Austin, Texas base for New York state. The 58-year-old looks beach-ready in a casual short-sleeve shirt, but is happy to dig into the guts of his own summer blockbuster. It has been gestating since 2018 when, after the success of Legion, the FX channel asked how he might approach an Alien show. 'If you ask me if I have an idea, I'm gonna have an idea,' he says. From the lofty prequel Prometheus to a shlocky crossover in Alien vs Predator, the franchise timeline has become cluttered over the past 45 years. Hawley's pitch zeroed in on unexplored territory: what was happening on Earth in the years just before the events of Alien. The result is a mashup of Peter Pan dreaminess and heavy metal doom, with a sprawling ensemble cast including Babou Ceesay as a poker-faced security officer and Timothy Olyphant as a blond android 'synth'. It is set in 2120 – a couple of years before Sigourney Weaver and her blue-collar crew of space truckers will have their fateful close encounter – and the Earth has, rather plausibly, been carved up by a cabal of all-powerful tech corporations. Weyland-Yutani, the franchise's longstanding corporate baddy, is obviously in the mix. But a pushy rival called Prodigy has secretly cracked transhumanism, decanting consciousness into powerful synth bodies. The catch is that only young minds are flexible enough for the process, so terminally ill kids are being reborn as herculean but emotionally immature 'hybrids'. 'If you're telling a story about humanity there's nobody more human than a child,' says Hawley. 'They don't know they're bad liars, they can't pretend they're not scared and they learn to be cynical. So that was interesting to me.' When a hulking research vessel carrying unpleasant cosmic beasties crash-lands on a hi-tech city in Thailand, the hybrids are deployed on a search-and-rescue mission. 'We're fast, we're strong and we don't break,' points out lead hybrid Wendy, played with suitably childlike glee by Sydney Chandler (Pistol, Sugar). The stage is set for a corporate turf war amid a citywide state of emergency. Coming up with new aliens that could exist alongside the familiar xenomorph was 'daunting' for Hawley. The aim was to evoke the feeling of watching Alien for the first time. 'They don't have to carry the day,' he says. 'They just have to offer that feeling of unpredictability. By introducing these other creatures, I am able to give you a sense of: well, now I don't know what's going to happen.' After the fraught terrain of Fargo and Legion, where an emotional gut punch never felt far away, Alien: Earth feels like Hawley in a brasher, more swaggering mode. Classic Black Sabbath was a touchstone. 'I wanted this show to be completely entertaining from start to finish,' he says. 'It's complex and layered but it's also a cliffhanger show and you get those big feelings from hard rock and driving guitars. I want you to come out of each episode going: yeah, come on!' Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Hawley was born and grew up in New York City (he has a twin brother, Alexi, who has carved out his own career as a TV writer and producer). It was a creative household: his mother, Louise Armstrong, was a writer, painter and activist; his father trained as an actor. 'We grew up in the West Village in the 70s and 80s when the only people down there were artists,' he says. 'It was not the billionaire row that it is today.' After studying political science, Hawley worked as a paralegal while also playing in rock bands and dabbling in creative writing. At 27, he had moved to San Francisco and published his first novel. Despite getting a two-book deal he was struggling with the follow-up. 'My editor had left, and the publisher wasn't really interested in the book that I wrote,' he says, 'so I was in kind of a desperate moment.' Helping a friend refine a screenplay led to him pitching and selling his own projects: 'Within six months I went from someone who basically didn't know how I was going to keep the lights on until the end of the year to this whole other career.' He has continued to write novels in parallel with his showrunner career – his sixth, Anthem, was published in 2022 – and made his feature directorial debut in 2019 with the astronaut psychodrama Lucy in the Sky, starring Natalie Portman. If this magpie approach suggests a certain creative restlessness – he also provided vocals for Legion's spacey soundtrack of retro covers – it has also been a conscious attempt at diversifying. 'It's given me a lot of options, which as an artist translates into a modicum of control over your own destiny,' he says. One unexpected early influence is British comedy. After studying theatre in London, his father returned with Goon Show LPs that Hawley and his brother could soon recite by heart. 'I just wore those records out,' he remembers. He also devoured NPR repeats of the BBC's 1978 radio adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and enthuses about seeing The Young Ones at an impressionable age. That meant the casting of Adrian Edmondson as a sinister aide-de-camp in Alien: Earth was a real full-circle moment. 'I told Adrian that there was a moment on The Young Ones [in the episode Flood] that informs everything you need to know about me as a storyteller,' he says. 'It was when his character, Vyvyan, walked into the closet and ended up in Narnia. I must have been in my teens when I saw it and it was such a mind-blowing thing, that you could have magical realism in a comedy about roommates.' What was it like meeting his childhood hero? 'I've found with a lot of comedic actors that their downtime persona is very different. Adrian is very measured, you know.' Hawley laughs. 'He's much more like his character in our show than Vyvyan.' Alien: Earth launches 13 August on Disney+ in the UK.
The Guardian
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Where to start with: Elizabeth Strout
American author Elizabeth Strout has captured millions of readers' imaginations with her small-town stories of ordinary people with rich inner lives. Her novels – often set in Maine, where she grew up – have won her a Pulitzer and got her shortlisted for the Booker and, this year, the Women's prize for fiction. Joe Stone gives us a tour of her interconnected oeuvre. Strout's first novel, Amy and Isabelle, introduces many of the themes which characterise her work. It's a close study of small-town life, exploring class, shame and the essential unknowability of others. When we meet anxious secretary Isabelle and her teenage daughter Amy, the claustrophobic domesticity in which they've existed has recently been shattered. Amy has been seduced by her high-school maths teacher, which threatens to dismantle Isabelle's dearly held propriety and the decades-old secret it conceals. At once intricate and expansive, the novel introduced Strout's rare gift for uncovering the profound in the quotidian. While her first two novels were critically lauded, it was Olive Kitteridge – which won the Pulitzer prize and was adapted into an Emmy-winning HBO miniseries starring Frances McDormand – that established Strout as a singular talent. A novel told in 13 short stories, it centres on Olive, one of fiction's most endearing and infuriating creations. Prone to displaying extraordinary compassion to strangers, but incapable of thanking her gentle husband for a bunch of ugly flowers, Olive charges through the world at once trenchant in her own righteousness and bewildered by her inability to understand the motives of others (most significantly, her son Christopher, who she loves with a fierceness that drives him away). The resulting missed human connections have heartbreaking, funny and thrilling consequences – memorably when Olive responds to a slight from her daughter-in-law by defacing one of her sweaters with magic marker and stealing a shoe in the hope that she'll believe she's losing her mind (somehow, we cheer her on). At one point, studying an old photo of her husband, Olive thinks 'You will marry a beast, and love her.' Is she a beast? She certainly can be. But we love her. All of Strout's novels are fan favourites, but My Name is Lucy Barton marks the first in her Amgash series (named after the fictional Illinois town where much of the action takes place), and introduces characters who feature in four subsequent novels. The book is presented as the memoir of its titular character, reflecting on a period years earlier, when her taciturn mother visited her during a lengthy hospital stay. Their oblique conversations, and Lucy's dreamlike recollections, paint a dismal portrait of her impoverished, isolated childhood. Over five days, the pair share anecdotes about figures from their past, but it is the gaps in their conversation that prove most revealing – they don't discuss Lucy's father's brutalities or her mother's inability to tell her she loves her. It is within these vibrating silences that Lucy attempts to untangle a very imperfect kind of love, and reconcile her current life with the beginnings she transcended. Strout's books are not exactly thrillers. Readers come to her for her authorial voice and unsentimental insights into the human condition, and her work is more concerned with theme than plot. Still, there are inciting incidents: affairs, suicides and the occasional armed robbery. Tell Me Everything incorporates a murder mystery – attorney Bob Burgess (who first appeared in Strout's fourth book, The Burgess Boys, and who we are told has a big heart 'but did not know that about himself') is called to defend a reclusive man accused of murdering his mother. It also features a will-they-won't-they romance between Bob and Lucy Barton. This intertextual element is another joy of Strout's work. Many of her books contain the same characters, all living in Crosby, Maine, and crossing paths in unexpected ways, making her work the literary equivalent of The Marvel Cinematic Universe. In Tell Me Everything, characters from all of Strout's previous novels coalesce – most excitingly when Lucy is summoned for an audience with Olive Kitteridge (Olive's initial verdict? 'Meek-and-mousy'). After this shaky start, the pair continue meeting to discuss the 'unrecorded lives' of people they have known, and grapple with one of the central questions of Strout's work: what does anyone's life mean? It's perhaps strange to describe Anything Is Possible as cheerful; one review billed it as 'a requiem for small town pain'. This 2017 novel, told in interlinked stories, is a companion to 2016's My Name Is Lucy Barton, which was written at the same time. It features a wellspring of dark themes; chiefly, the legacies of childhood trauma. One story, Sister, sees Lucy Barton reunited with her estranged siblings, and reveals the true horror of their upbringing, lightly sketched in the earlier book. Elsewhere, the Nicely sisters are still metabolising the shame of their mother's affair, and her subsequent defection from the family, decades earlier. For Linda, this sense of abandonment has curdled into something sinister, and she colludes with her husband to spy on female house guests. It's perhaps Strout's most macabre story. Meanwhile, Linda's sister, nicknamed 'Fatty Patty' by the students she acts as a guidance counsellor for, is rendered leaden by the weight of her unexpressed love. As for the cheer? This gloom is punctuated by shimmers of grace, and reprieve arrives in unlikely forms. Patty finds her own struggles both dignified and understood by the memoir Lucy has written, and her quiet communion with traumatised Vietnam vet Charlie hints at a more substantive redemption. 'Love was the skin that protected you from the world,' she decides. Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout is out now in paperback (Viking). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Where to start with: Elizabeth Strout
American author Elizabeth Strout has captured millions of readers' imaginations with her small-town stories of ordinary people with rich inner lives. Her novels – often set in Maine, where she grew up – have won her a Pulitzer and got her shortlisted for the Booker and, this year, the Women's prize for fiction. Joe Stone gives us a tour of her interconnected oeuvre. Strout's first novel, Amy and Isabelle, introduces many of the themes which characterise her work. It's a close study of small-town life, exploring class, shame and the essential unknowability of others. When we meet anxious secretary Isabelle and her teenage daughter Amy, the claustrophobic domesticity in which they've existed has recently been shattered. Amy has been seduced by her high-school maths teacher, which threatens to dismantle Isabelle's dearly held propriety and the decades-old secret it conceals. At once intricate and expansive, the novel introduced Strout's rare gift for uncovering the profound in the quotidian. While her first two novels were critically lauded, it was Olive Kitteridge – which won the Pulitzer prize and was adapted into an Emmy-winning HBO miniseries starring Frances McDormand – that established Strout as a singular talent. A novel told in 13 short stories, it centres on Olive, one of fiction's most endearing and infuriating creations. Prone to displaying extraordinary compassion to strangers, but incapable of thanking her gentle husband for a bunch of ugly flowers, Olive charges through the world at once trenchant in her own righteousness and bewildered by her inability to understand the motives of others (most significantly, her son Christopher, who she loves with a fierceness that drives him away). The resulting missed human connections have heartbreaking, funny and thrilling consequences – memorably when Olive responds to a slight from her daughter-in-law by defacing one of her sweaters with magic marker and stealing a shoe in the hope that she'll believe she's losing her mind (somehow, we cheer her on). At one point, studying an old photo of her husband, Olive thinks 'You will marry a beast, and love her.' Is she a beast? She certainly can be. But we love her. All of Strout's novels are fan favourites, but My Name is Lucy Barton marks the first in her Amgash series (named after the fictional Illinois town where much of the action takes place), and introduces characters who feature in four subsequent novels. The book is presented as the memoir of its titular character, reflecting on a period years earlier, when her taciturn mother visited her during a lengthy hospital stay. Their oblique conversations, and Lucy's dreamlike recollections, paint a dismal portrait of her impoverished, isolated childhood. Over five days, the pair share anecdotes about figures from their past, but it is the gaps in their conversation that prove most revealing – they don't discuss Lucy's father's brutalities or her mother's inability to tell her she loves her. It is within these vibrating silences that Lucy attempts to untangle a very imperfect kind of love, and reconcile her current life with the beginnings she transcended. Strout's books are not exactly thrillers. Readers come to her for her authorial voice and unsentimental insights into the human condition, and her work is more concerned with theme than plot. Still, there are inciting incidents: affairs, suicides and the occasional armed robbery. Tell Me Everything incorporates a murder mystery – attorney Bob Burgess (who first appeared in Strout's fourth book, The Burgess Boys, and who we are told has a big heart 'but did not know that about himself') is called to defend a reclusive man accused of murdering his mother. It also features a will-they-won't-they romance between Bob and Lucy Barton. This intertextual element is another joy of Strout's work. Many of her books contain the same characters, all living in Crosby, Maine, and crossing paths in unexpected ways, making her work the literary equivalent of The Marvel Cinematic Universe. In Tell Me Everything, characters from all of Strout's previous novels coalesce – most excitingly when Lucy is summoned for an audience with Olive Kitteridge (Olive's initial verdict? 'Meek-and-mousy'). After this shaky start, the pair continue meeting to discuss the 'unrecorded lives' of people they have known, and grapple with one of the central questions of Strout's work: what does anyone's life mean? It's perhaps strange to describe Anything Is Possible as cheerful; one review billed it as 'a requiem for small town pain'. This 2017 novel, told in interlinked stories, is a companion to 2016's My Name Is Lucy Barton, which was written at the same time. It features a wellspring of dark themes; chiefly, the legacies of childhood trauma. One story, Sister, sees Lucy Barton reunited with her estranged siblings, and reveals the true horror of their upbringing, lightly sketched in the earlier book. Elsewhere, the Nicely sisters are still metabolising the shame of their mother's affair, and her subsequent defection from the family, decades earlier. For Linda, this sense of abandonment has curdled into something sinister, and she colludes with her husband to spy on female house guests. It's perhaps Strout's most macabre story. Meanwhile, Linda's sister, nicknamed 'Fatty Patty' by the students she acts as a guidance counsellor for, is rendered leaden by the weight of her unexpressed love. As for the cheer? This gloom is punctuated by shimmers of grace, and reprieve arrives in unlikely forms. Patty finds her own struggles both dignified and understood by the memoir Lucy has written, and her quiet communion with traumatised Vietnam vet Charlie hints at a more substantive redemption. 'Love was the skin that protected you from the world,' she decides. Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout is out now in paperback (Viking). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Time of India
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Oscar speeches that won hearts and how: When winners made history with their words
For many actors, winning an Oscar is the dream. But in some cases, the acceptance speech becomes the real legacy — a moment when a personal triumph transforms into a message for millions. These powerful speeches were not just thank-yous; they were statements that changed the conversation, offered hope, and left a permanent mark on Hollywood's history. 1. Frances McDormand – Championing Women in Film (2018) Category: Best Actress Film: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri Frances McDormand's third Oscar win wasn't just a career high — it became a rallying cry. As she stood on stage, she didn't focus on herself but on the many women around her. She urged all female nominees in every category to rise, turning the camera to faces often left in the background. She called upon Meryl Streep , a symbol of industry respect, to lead the way. Then came her now-famous mic-drop moment: 'I have two words to leave with you tonight: inclusion rider.' That phrase sparked a movement in Hollywood to demand diversity clauses in contracts, ensuring equity behind and in front of the camera. McDormand's speech wasn't emotional — it was revolutionary. 2. Hattie McDaniel – A Win Against the Odds (1940) Category: Best Supporting Actress Film: Gone With the Wind In a deeply segregated America, Hattie McDaniel's win was groundbreaking — and painful. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Investigadora argentina revela hallazgos sobre el magnesio Salud Esencial Leer más Undo The first Black actor to receive an Oscar wasn't even allowed to sit with her white co-stars. She was escorted to the ceremony and seated at a separate table. Despite this injustice, McDaniel approached the stage with grace. 'I sincerely hope I shall always be a credit to my race and to the motion picture industry.' Her words were filled with quiet dignity, masking the weight of systemic racism she faced every day. She accepted her Oscar not just for herself, but for generations to come. 3. Lupita Nyong'o – A Dream Realized (2014) Category: Best Supporting Actress Film: 12 Years a Slave Lupita Nyong'o's breakthrough performance earned her global acclaim — but her acceptance speech is what made her unforgettable. With poise and sincerity, she thanked her co-stars, her family, and her director, then offered a message that instantly became iconic: 'No matter where you are from, your dreams are valid.' Born in Mexico and raised in Kenya, Lupita's success was not typical by Hollywood standards. Her speech celebrated diversity and showed aspiring artists around the world that anything was possible. 4. Ariana DeBose – Pride and Representation (2022) Category: Best Supporting Actress Film: West Side Story Ariana DeBose used her moment to celebrate something bigger than herself — identity. As an openly queer Afro-Latina woman, her win marked a turning point for inclusivity in mainstream cinema. 'You see an openly queer woman of color, an Afro-Latina, who found her strength in life through art.' She reflected on her childhood, sitting in the back of a white Ford, and asked audiences to look into the eyes of that young girl and recognize the power of possibility. Her words were an emotional nod to those still seeking acceptance. 5. Ke Huy Quan – From Refugee to Oscar Winner (2023) Category: Best Supporting Actor Film: Everything Everywhere All At Once Ke Huy Quan's return to the big screen was one of the most moving comeback stories in recent Oscar history. A former child star of Indiana Jones and The Goonies, he had faded from the limelight for decades. But his win wasn't just about redemption — it was about resilience. 'My mom is 84 years old and she's at home watching. Mom, I just won an Oscar!' He spoke of arriving in America as a refugee and finding himself years later on Hollywood's biggest stage. His closing line, 'This is the American dream,' echoed far beyond the Dolby Theatre. 6. Halle Berry – A Milestone for Black Women (2002) Category: Best Actress Film: Monster's Ball In 2002, Halle Berry became the first — and still only — Black woman to win the Best Actress Oscar. Overwhelmed by emotion, her speech acknowledged the historical weight of her win: 'This moment is so much bigger than me.' She dedicated the award to women of color who were never given the opportunity, calling it a door opening moment. Two decades later, her win still serves as a benchmark for representation in Hollywood's highest echelon. 7. Brendan Fraser – Gratitude After the Fall (2023) Category: Best Actor Film: The Whale Fraser's acceptance was more than a win — it was a homecoming. After years of personal and professional hardship, The Whale marked his return to critical acclaim. On stage, Fraser fought back tears as he acknowledged the emotional depth the role required. 'Things didn't come easily to me... I just want to say thank you for this acknowledgement.' His gratitude extended to his cast and crew, praising them for laying their 'whale-sized hearts bare.' It was a humble, heartfelt speech that touched many who had followed his journey. 8. Bonus: Viola Davis – Honoring Roots and Resilience (2017) Category: Best Supporting Actress Film: Fences Viola Davis brought her trademark intensity to the stage, offering one of the night's most poignant moments. Reflecting on her upbringing and her family's sacrifices, she thanked her husband and daughter, calling them the foundation of her life. 'You know, there's one place that all the people with the greatest potential are gathered — and that's the graveyard.' Her speech emphasized the power of telling stories that honor the unsung and the unseen — the ordinary lives that make extraordinary art. Check out our list of the latest Hindi , English , Tamil , Telugu , Malayalam , and Kannada movies . 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