“Theory of Everything” star Eddie Redmayne recognized people suffering from ALS, and Bradley Cooper — twice — when accepting the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role.
“This has been such an extraordinary year for performances, to be included in this number of Michael, Ben, Jake, Steve, but beyond that to Bradley Cooper to David Oyelowo to Bradley Cooper – oh, I said Bradley Cooper,” Redmayne said on Sunday night. “To be included in this group is a great privilege to me, these are all actors I have long admired.”
Redmayne beat out Steve Carell, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Keaton to claim the award. His victory follows a Golden Globes win and an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, who was diagnosed with ALS as a young man.
“I would like to dedicate this award, this very wonderful skinny man, to those people around the world living with ALS, to those who have lost their lives to this brutal disease,” Redmayne continued. “In preparing to play Stephen I met a lot of people with ALS, and I met their families fighting along side them, and the courage and the bravery and the triumph of spirit blew my mind.”
Julianne Moore capped off a predictable evening of winners when she won Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role for “Still Alice,” a drama about a renowned linguistics professor whose vocabulary begins to suffer when she is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. Like Redmayne, as well as SAG Award winners J.K. Simmons and Patricia Arquette, Moore has already won a Golden Globe for her performance, and was nominated for an Oscar this year.
“When I was on ‘As the World Turns,’ I was so excited when they wrote two parts for me — the classic twin sister role, the good and the evil one. And then I realized it was super boring to act by myself,” Moore said during her unusual acceptance speech. “What I really loved and what I really craved was being with another actor and feeling that intimacy, and that excitement and thrill and getting to know someone in that way, that’s what brings me back to acting again and again.”