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‘Shogun’ and ‘Hacks’ Win Top Series Emmy Awards and ‘The Bear’ and ‘Baby Reindeer’ Take 4 Apiece

Anna Sawai, winner the Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series award and Hiroyuki Sanada, Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for "Shogun", which was awarded with the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series, pose at the 76th Primetime Emmy Awards in Los Angeles, California, US, September 15, 2024. (Reuters)
Anna Sawai, winner the Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series award and Hiroyuki Sanada, Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for "Shogun", which was awarded with the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series, pose at the 76th Primetime Emmy Awards in Los Angeles, California, US, September 15, 2024. (Reuters)
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‘Shogun’ and ‘Hacks’ Win Top Series Emmy Awards and ‘The Bear’ and ‘Baby Reindeer’ Take 4 Apiece

Anna Sawai, winner the Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series award and Hiroyuki Sanada, Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for "Shogun", which was awarded with the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series, pose at the 76th Primetime Emmy Awards in Los Angeles, California, US, September 15, 2024. (Reuters)
Anna Sawai, winner the Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series award and Hiroyuki Sanada, Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for "Shogun", which was awarded with the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series, pose at the 76th Primetime Emmy Awards in Los Angeles, California, US, September 15, 2024. (Reuters)

"Shogun" had historic wins in an epic 18-Emmy first season, "Hacks" scored an upset for best comedy on what was still a four-trophy night for "The Bear," and "Baby Reindeer" had a holiday at an Emmy Awards that had some surprising swerves.

"Shogun," the FX series about power struggles in feudal Japan, won best drama series, Hiroyuki Sanada won best actor in a drama, and Anna Sawai won best actress. Sanada was the first Japanese actor to win an Emmy. Sawai became the second just moments later.

"‘Shogun’ taught me when we work together, we can make miracles," Sanada said in his acceptance speech from the stage of the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles.

Along with 14 Emmys it claimed at the precursor Creative Arts Emmys, it had an unmatched performance with 18 overall for one season.

"Hacks" was the surprise winner of its first best comedy series award, topping "The Bear," which most had expected to take it after big wins earlier in the evening.

Jean Smart won her third best actress in a comedy award for the third season of Max's "Hacks," in which her stand-up comic character Deborah Vance tries to make it in late-night TV. Smart has six Emmys overall.

Despite losing out on the night's biggest comedy prize after winning it for its first season at January's strike-delayed ceremony, FX's "The Bear" star Jeremy Allen White won best actor in a comedy for the second straight year, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach repeated as best supporting actor.

And Liza Colón-Zayas was the surprise best supporting actor winner over competition that included Meryl Streep, becoming the first Latina to win in the category.

"To all the Latinas who are looking at me," she said, her eyes welling with tears. "Keep believing, and vote."

Netflix’s darkly quirky "Baby Reindeer" won best limited series. Creator and star Richard Gadd won for his lead acting and his writing and Jessica Gunning, who plays his tormentor, won best supporting actress.

Accepting the series award, Gadd urged the makers of television to take chances.

"The only constant across any success in television is good storytelling," he said. "Good storytelling that speaks to our times. So take risks, push boundaries. Explore the uncomfortable. Dare to fail in order to achieve."

"Baby Reindeer" is based on a one man-stage show in which Gadd describes being sexually abused along with other emotional struggles.

Accepting that award, he said, "no matter how bad it gets, it always gets better."

The Associated Press does not typically name people who say they have been sexually abused unless they come forward publicly as Gadd has.

Jodie Foster won her first Emmy to go with her two Oscars when she took best actress in a limited series for "True Detective: Night Country."

Foster played a salty police chief investigating a mass killing in the round-the-clock dark of an Alaskan winter on the HBO show. While her castmate Kali Reis missed out on becoming the first Indigenous actor to win an Emmy in the supporting category, Foster praised her, and the show's collaboration with Indigenous contributors.

"The Inupiaq and Inuit people of northern Alaska who told us their stories, and they allowed us to listen," Foster said. "That was just a blessing. It was love, love, love, and when you feel that, something amazing happens."

The long decline of traditional broadcast TV at the Emmys continued, with zero wins between the four broadcast networks.

In the monologue that opened the ABC telecast, Dan Levy, who hosted with his father and "Schitt's Creek" co-star Eugene Levy, called the Emmys "broadcast TV’s biggest night for honoring movie stars on streaming services."

Though other than Foster, movie stars didn't fare too well. Her fellow Oscar winners Streep and Robert Downey Jr. had been among the favorites, but came up empty.

"Robert Downey Jr. I have a poster of you in my house!" said Lamorne Morris, who beat Downey for best supporting actor in a limited series, said from the stage as he accepted his first Emmy.

The evening managed to meet many expectations but included several swerves like the win for "Hacks."

"We were really shocked,Hacks co-creator Jen Statsky, who also won for writing, said after the show. "We were truly, really surprised."

And "Shogun" got off to a quiet start, missing on early awards and not getting its first trophy until past the halfway point.

Still, it shattered the record for Emmys for one season previously held by the 2008 limited series "John Adams" in 2008. And its acting wins would have been hard to imagine before the series became an acclaimed phenomenon.

Sanada is a 63-year-old longtime screen star whose name is little known outside Japan, even if his face is through Hollywood films like "The Last Samurai" and "John Wick Chapter 4." Sawai, 32, who was born in New Zealand and moved to Japan as a child, is significantly less known in the US. She wept when she accepted best actress.

"When you saw me cry on stage, it was probably the 12th time I cried today," Sawai said backstage. "It was just mixed emotions, wanting everyone to win all that. I may cry again now."

"The Bear" would finish second with 11 overall Emmys, including guest acting wins at the Creative Arts ceremony for Jamie Lee Curtis and Jon Bernthal.

The Levys in their opening monologue mocked the show being in the comedy category.

"In honor of ‘The Bear’ we will be making no jokes," Eugene Levy said, to laughs.

Elizabeth Debicki took best supporting actress in a drama for playing Princess Diana at the end of her life in the sixth and final season of "The Crown."

"Playing this part, based on this unparalleled, incredible human being, has been my great privilege," Debicki said in her acceptance. "It’s been a gift."

Several awards were presented by themed teams from TV history, including sitcom dads George Lopez, Damon Wayans and Jesse Tyler Ferguson and TV moms Meredith Baxter, Connie Britton, and Susan Kelechi Watson.

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Entertainment

‘The Brutalist’ Doesn’t Work without Guy Pearce

Guy Pearce poses for photographers upon arrival for the premiere of the film "The Brutalist" in London, Wednesday, Jan.15, 2025. (AP)
Guy Pearce poses for photographers upon arrival for the premiere of the film "The Brutalist" in London, Wednesday, Jan.15, 2025. (AP)
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‘The Brutalist’ Doesn’t Work without Guy Pearce

Guy Pearce poses for photographers upon arrival for the premiere of the film "The Brutalist" in London, Wednesday, Jan.15, 2025. (AP)
Guy Pearce poses for photographers upon arrival for the premiere of the film "The Brutalist" in London, Wednesday, Jan.15, 2025. (AP)

Over the years, Guy Pearce has been good in most all things. But he’s been particularly good at playing characters with a refined disposition who harbor darker impulses underneath.

That was true of his breakout performance in “L.A. Confidential" as a squeaky clean police detective whose ambitions outstrip his ethics. It was true of his dashing upper-class bachelor in “Mildred Pierce.” And it’s most definitely true of his mid-Atlantic tycoon in “The Brutalist.”

“I’m really aware of how precarious we are as human beings,” Pearce says. “Good people can do bad things and bad people can do good things. Moment to moment, we’re trying to just get through the day. We’re trying to be good. And we can do good things for ourselves and other people, but pretty easily we can be tipped off course.”

That sense of duality has served Pearce’s characters well, especially his men of class who turn out to have less of it than they seem. His Harrison Lee Van Buren in “The Brutalist” may be Pearce’s most colossally two-faced concoction yet. If Brady Corbet’s film, which was nominated for 10 Oscars on Thursday, is one of the best films of the year, it’s Pearce’s performance that gives the movie its disquieting shiver.

Pearce’s Van Buren is a recognizable kind of villain: a well-bred aristocrat who, at first, is a benevolent benefactor to Adrien Brody’s architect László Tóth. But what begins as a friendship — Tóth, a Holocaust survivor is nearly destitute when they meet — turns increasingly ugly, as Van Buren’s patronage, warped by jealousy and privilege, turns into a creeping sense of ownership over Tóth. The psychodrama eventually boils over in a grim, climactic scene in which Van Buren pronounces Tóth “just a lady of the night.”

“What was great to discuss with Brady is that he is actually a man of taste,” said Pearce in a recent interview. “He’s a man of class and a man of sophistication. He’s not just a bull in a China shop. He’s not just about greed, taking, taking, taking. It’s probably as much of a curse as anything that he can recognize beauty and he can recognize other people’s artistry.”

For his performance, the 57-year-old Pearce on Thursday landed his first Oscar nomination – a long-in-coming and perhaps overdue honor for the character actor of “Memento,” “The Count of Monte Cristo” and “The King’s Speech.” For the Australian-born Pearce, such recognitions are as awkward as they are rewarding. He long ago decided Hollywood stardom wasn’t for him.

“I get uncomfortable with that, to be honest,” he says. “I’m really happy with doing a good performance. I can genuinely say within myself I’ve done a good job. Equally, I know when I’ve done a (bad) job. But I’m also well aware of how a performance can appear good purely because of the tone of the film. I might have done exactly the same performance in another movie with not such a good director, and people might have gone, ‘That was full-on but whatever.’ Whereas in this film, we are all better than we actually are because the film has integrity to it that elevates us all.”

Like F. Murray Abraham’s Saleri in “Amadeus,” Peace’s Van Buren has quickly ascended the ranks of great cinema villains to artists. The character likewise has some basis in reality, albeit extrapolated from a much different time and place. Corbet and Mona Fastvold, who are married and wrote “The Brutalist” together, were fueled by their hardships with financiers on their previous film, 2018's “Vox Lux.”

“We didn’t have a Van Buren but we certainly had our fill of complicated relationships with the people who hold the purse strings,” says Fastvold. “There’s a sense of: I have ownership of the project because I’m paying for it, and I almost have ownership of you.”

Pearce has been around the movie business long enough to shake hands with plenty of wealthy men putting money toward a film production. But he says none of his own experiences went into “The Brutalist.”

“There’s always this slew of producers at a higher level than us who come and visit the set,” Pearce says. “I’m polite and I go, ‘Hi, nice to meet you. Thanks.’ But I’m a little caught up with what I’m doing. Then three years later you’ll meet someone who says, ‘You know, I was a producer on “L.A. Confidential.”’ Ah, were you?”

Pearce, who lives in the Netherlands, has generally kept much of Hollywood at arm's length. In conversation, he tends to be chipper and humble — more interested in talking Aussie rules football than the Oscar race. “Any chance to have a kick, I'll have a kick,” he says with smile.

That youthful spirit Pearce tends to apply to his acting as well. Pearce, who started performing in the mid-'80s on the long-running Australian soap opera “Neighbors,” doesn't like to be precious about performing.

“If I’m hanging on to it all day, it’s exhausting,” Pearce says. “The thing that still exists for me is using our imagination, which is kind of a childlike venture. I think there’s something valuable about that even as adults. I think you can be all ages at all times.”

Pearce compares receiving the script from Corbet to “The Brutalist” to when Christopher Nolan approached him 25 years ago. Both times, he went back to watch the director's earlier films and quickly decided this was an opportunity to pounce at.

In digging into Van Buren, Pearce was guided less by real-life experience than the script. The hardest entry way to the character, he says, was the voice. “Thankfully,” Pearce says, “I’m friends with Danny Huston and he’s got a wonderfully old-fashioned voice.” He and Corbet didn't speak much about the director's hardships on “Vox Lux.”

“I know that it was troubled. Brady is going to have trouble on every film he makes, I reckon, because he is such a visionary,” says Pearce. “I know on this there were producers trying to get him to cut the time down. Of course, all those producers now are going, ‘I was with him all the way.’”

To a certain degree, Pearce says, he doesn't fully understand a performance while he's doing it. He's more likely to understand it fully afterward while watching. Take that “lady of the night scene.” While filming, Pearce felt he was saying that line to put Tóth in his place. “But when I watched it, I went: ‘I’m just telling myself. I’m purely telling myself,’” he says. “There’s something even more distasteful about it.”

It's ironic, in a way, that Van Buren, a man bent on control, is played so indelibly by an actor who seeks to impose so little of it, himself.

“There’s a performative element to Van Buren. He exhausts himself because he’s trying to dominate, to be the one in charge, be Mr. Charming,” Pearce says. “I don’t think he can ever enter a room without being self-conscious. That’s an exhausting way to be, I reckon.”