It’s the first year of the newly rechristened “Actor Awards” — but for the kudocast formerly known as the SAG Awards, Sunday’s ceremony was all about the music. The 32nd annual Actor Awards featured a live band for the first time, led by music director Rickey Minor, and featured several musical performances.
“This is our third year on Netflix, and every year we look to continue upping the ante a little more,” said executive producer Mark Bracco, whose shingle Silent House Productions produces the Actor Awards with SAG-AFTRA. “Last year, we really wanted to bring more fun and more comedy into the show. This year, a big goal was to bring more music into the show.”
And that they did, including an opening number performed by host Kristen Bell, who leaned into the title shift from the “SAG Awards” to the “Actor Awards” with an original number poking fun at celebrity name changes. Later, “Sinners” star Miles Caton performed a version of “This Little Light of Mine” from the film. Then there was Minor and his band, adding live music throughout the evening.
“It felt so good to have something so robust and real in the room, to have real music,” said showrunner and executive producer Jon Brockett. “It was, and I’m going to apologize in advance for saying this, music to my ears.”
Added fellow EP Linda Gierahn, also from Silent House Prods.: “Rickey is such a pro and brings so much life and energy to it. I mean, it’s just a total game changer, to have that live music in the room.”
Variety spoke to Brockett (who added “showrunner” to his duties for the first time this year), Bracco and Gierahn before the Actor Awards to get some embargoed background on what they had planned for the evening. Now, they can share.
The “Abbott Elementary” cold open follows previous ones that the Actor Awards has done with “Ted Lasso” and “Hacks.” In this case, “Abbott” creator and star Quinta Brunson was involved with mapping out the idea.
“We pitched them the idea, we call it ‘Flip the Script,’ and it’s something we’ve been wanting to do for a while,” Brockett said. “And [Brunson] bit and just ran with it. They’re very busy, so we had some people on our awards team who helped come up with ideas for actual bits to pull from. But they executed it and came up with the whole writing and filming of it, and they did it on their stage, working it into their schedule.”
In having the “Abbott” stars excitedly talk about Actor-nominated TV and film projects, Brunson came up with the idea of Sheryl Lee Ralph’s character, Barbara, as the entry point, since she’s always confusing pop culture references and celebrity names.
“My favorite part was Mr. Johnson, the janitor, his favorite movie is ‘Bugonia,’” Bracco said. “It’s so in their voices, because they’re all just in the break room. And to me, it’s like, that’s what people do at work. They sit around and talk about their favorite movies and TV shows. They totally embraced it and shot it just last week, so it happened really fast.”
The “I’m an Actor” signature opening this year included Kristen Wiig, Delroy Lindo, Michael J. Fox, Teyana Taylor and Kate Hudson.
“It was just such a great, eclectic lineup of people, and their stories ranged from really funny to really emotional,” Bracco said. “I think people look forward to these every year.”
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Host Kristen Bell enlisted songwriter pals of hers to create the original opening music number, “A Stage Name.”
The idea of another opening number came after last year’s show, when Bell opened with “Do You Want to Be an Actor,” a play on her “Frozen” song “Do You Want to Build a Snowman.” (Bell referenced “going back to the well” in introducing the bit.)
“She got inspired by the idea that the name of the show was changing, and reached out to a couple of songwriter friends of hers who came up with an original song that is based off of actors who either changed their name — or some suggestions of names she thinks actors should change their names to,” Bracco said. “It was very referential of everyone in the audience, and very funny. Some of the name suggestions are completely ridiculous, and it’s great. We’re kind of making fun of ourselves a little bit, but also leaning into name changes.”
Said Brockett: “I think my favorite suggested name change was for Jesse Plemons, as Jesse Plimes — as in, lemons and limes. I literally laughed out loud.”
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Miles Caton was tapped to perform that special rendition of “This Little Light of Mine” came after the producers saw his performance in “Sinners.”
“One of the things that was really important to us was making sure that any musical number that we did stayed within the DNA of our show,” Brockett said. “So a performance oriented within a nominated film or TV show made the most sense to us. This year, one of the the ideas was to bring in Miles Caton for this. When I was listening to the ‘Sinners’ soundtrack, there was a moment where Miles comes in and he sings an acoustic version with his guitar of ‘This Little Light of Mine,’ and it is beautiful. I got chills. It gave me all the feelings that I’ve ever had, all in one moment. Wow.”
By the way, that was Caton’s young 11-year-old cousin, CJ, who opened the piece as a soloist. “It’s so beautiful,” Brockett said.
Bell came up with the idea of having some of her buddies, like Ted Danson, Jackie Tohn, Ike Barinholtz and Jacobi Jupe, playing a “Marty Supreme”-like ping pong tournament backstage.
“The First Annual Kristen Bell Actor Awards Sports Championship” featured a trophy that Bell made herself.
“We love a runner, so does Kristen,” Brockett said. “It’s like having a through line.”
Added Bracco: “We fleshed it all out together. But she wanted to do it. And then, she said, ‘I want to have a goofy trophy.’ So we said, ‘All right, we’ll go out, do you want us to get a kid’s soccer trophy and slap a picture of Timothy on it? And she’s like, ‘No, I’m gonna make the trophy.’ And she did. I don’t know when she has time to do these things, but she made the trophy, and it’s ridiculous.”
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“The Pitt” writers came up with the fake medical dialogue that host Bell didn’t look at before trying to recite on the show.
“We coordinated this through Warner Bros. Television, and the word from Noah Wyle was to make it really hard,” Bracco said.
The stage was rotated 90 degrees this year, giving the production more room for various antics.
“There was not a bad seat in the house,” Gierahn said. Added Brockett: “A big part of is what helped us having a house band. We wouldn’t have been able to even have the room for a house band before if we didn’t reorient the room.”
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Mindy Kaling was instrumental in organizing “The Office” female cast reunion on the awards show.
“Mindy Kaling sort of became a pseudo talent booker for our show,” Bracco said. “We had reached out to her about being a presenter, and she came back with the idea of, ‘what if I did a reunion with all the women of “The Office,”‘ and we’re like, ‘yeah!’ Within like an hour, she had texted all of them, and she basically booked them all for us. So she had texted with Jenna Fisher and Angela Kinsey and Ellie Kemper, and I’m not kidding, like, within 90 minutes, they were all booked, and presenting on the show.”
With limited commercial breaks on Netflix, this year the producers filled some time with four special packages — about medical dialogue, physical comedy, troublemaker characters and the art of the romcom.
“They were wrapped up into the commercial breaks, and we came back in from the commercial break into the show with them, and they kind of celebrated different genres of acting and different kind of angles of acting,” Brockett said.