Zoe Salda?a wins Best Supporting Actress at SAG Awards after ‘Emilia Pérez’ controversy
Emilia Pérez star Zoe Salda?a continued her march toward the Oscars stage on Sunday night with a win at the 2025 Screen Actors Guild Awards.
At the event, Salda?a won Best Supporting Actress honors, besting a field that included Oscar nominees Monica Barbaro (A Complete Unknown) and Ariana Grande (Wicked). The other SAG Awards nominees for Best Supporting Actress were Jamie Lee Curtis (The Last Showgirl) and Danielle Deadwyler (The Piano Lesson).
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"To be in this room is a true honor. This is my community. This is my circus," Salda?a said while accepting the award before thanking her fellow nominees. She did not thank Karla Sofía Gascón (more on that below).
This is the latest precursor win for Salda?a, who previously won Best Supporting Actress awards at the Golden Globes, Critics Choice Awards, and BAFTA Awards. If Salda?a wins at the Oscars on March 2, she’ll join Ariana DeBose, Anne Hathaway, and Jennifer Hudson as Best Supporting Actress winners from a musical to have swept the televised portion of the awards season.
Despite a strong push from Grande, Salda?a has long been the frontrunner in this category. However, some doubted whether Salda?a could withstand the fallout from the controversy over her costar, Gascón. The Emilia Pérez lead — and a fellow SAG Awards and Oscar nominee — became the focal point of a days-long scandal of her own making when bigoted and offensive social media posts Gascón wrote over the last several years resurfaced. In her response to the outrage over her inflammatory comments, Gascón fumbled several attempts at apology and, ultimately, said she would back away from her film’s awards campaign. (She notably did not attend the SAG Awards on Sunday.)
While Gascón did herself little favor with her attempts to contextualize the posts, Salda?a quickly distanced herself from the blast radius. “I’m still processing everything that has transpired in the last couple of days, and I’m sad,” she said during an event in London just after the scandal erupted. “It makes me really sad because I don’t support, and I don’t have any tolerance for, any negative rhetoric towards people of any group. I can only attest to the experience that I had with each and every individual that was a part, that is a part, of this film, and my experience and my interactions with them were about inclusivity and collaboration and racial, cultural, and gender equity. And it just saddens me.”
She continued, “It saddens me that we are having to face this setback right now. But I’m happy that you’re all here and that you’re all still showing up for Emilia because the message that this film has is so powerful and the change that it can bring forward to communities that are marginalized day in and day out is important. And all that I can attest is that all of us that came together to tell this story, we came together for love and for respect and curiosity, and we will continue to spread that message. That’s all we can say right now. Thank you.”
After winning the Critics Choice Award, Salda?a did not mention Gascón by name, but did thank the film’s cast and crew. She added, “My wish for the impact of this film on audiences in our world is that I hope we can all be curious and open-hearted towards each other because you never know when you’ll have the opportunity to be a hero in someone else’s story. So our world is too big and too beautiful to be any other way.”
Once considered a potential Best Picture frontrunner at the Oscars, the expectation is that Emilia Pérez will win at least two awards at this year’s Academy Awards: Salda?a as Best Supporting Actress and Best Song for “El Mal” (Salda?a’s show-stopping number). The Netflix release is also a top competitor for Best International Feature.
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