10 Best Ways Actors Ever Received Awards
Jack Nicholson accepted his Best Actor BAFTA while shooting One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Great acting work speaks for itself, but there's no denying the value of awards to performers - if nothing else, they get to raise their asking quote for all future roles, and will forever have "Academy Award winner" written in front of their name.
And while the majority of actors accept their acting awards in the most straight-forward, bog standard way possible - saying a few polite thank-yous, talking about what the role meant to them, and then leaving the stage - every so often an actor will skirt the expected and do something totally different.
Perhaps they accepted their award in a wildly unexpected location, got into some hilarious shenanigans on-stage, or gave a speech that nobody saw coming.
Whatever they did, they quickly made headlines, and years or even decades later, these actors remain fondly remembered for their surprising, classy, and hilarious awards acceptances.
Everybody loves a humble actor, but sometimes it's nice to see awards conventions get blown apart in ways both entertaining and affecting. That these 10 actors most certainly did, each accepting their prize in a way that felt distinctly them...
10. Gollum Steals Andy Serkis' MTV Movie Award
Awards shows love gimmicky skits where CGI or animated characters make an appearance, and the 2003 MTV Movie Awards might lay claim to the best one ever, when Andy Serkis won the impressively ahead-of-its-time award for Best Virtual Performance.
Serkis scooped the gong for his turn as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, and because Serkis was in New Zealand shooting pickups for Return of the King at the time, he accepted the award via video-link.
Moments into Serkis' speech, however, a fully CGI-rendered Gollum runs into the studio, grabs the award, and starts proclaiming that he's the real reason Serkis won.
Gollum then goes on a self-hating rant while Serkis watches in agony, before Gollum starts dropping F-bombs and basically slagging off everyone in sight, including Serkis, Peter Jackson, MTV, and even Dobby the House Elf.
The skit quickly went viral - before, you now, "viral" was really a thing - and proved popular enough to actually win an award itself: the 2004 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form). Brilliant.