Dopesick Emmy Winner Michael Keaton Thanks His Family 'for Never Making Me Feel Foolish'
Michael Keaton has been named outstanding lead actor in a limited series or movie at the 74th Primetime Emmy Awards!
To present the night's first award, Oprah Winfrey took the stage. "As you can see tonight is a party," Winfrey, 68, said. "It's a celebration of the most successful broadcast medium in the world: television and this, you know what it is... it's an Emmy and it's the coveted television accolade on the planet and yet, it's impossible to win one... almost."
The TV personality continued, "they are 8 billion people on this planet but only 25 people Emmys to be given out tonight so you're chancing of winning are 300,000,000 to one."
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"So how do you win one? It starts with a dream, a dream strong enough to endure the knockdowns and the rejections because you can lose a role or lose as whole series but there's one thing you can never lose and that's the belief in yourself and without that belief you will never succeed and even with it, you got it best an outside chance."
Winfrey continued, "every Emmy nominee has been knocked down at some point, but you got back up and that's why you're here, voted by your peers as the very best. So let's make some dreams come true tonight."
As Keaton walked up the stage to cheers from the crowd, he hugged Winfrey and joked, "you got about 90 of these don't you?"
"My face hurts so much from the fake smiling I've been doing," the actor says. "Thanks to the great folks and Disney and Hulu and everyone at that table. This is one of the special projects I've ever worked on and it means something so thanks a lot, I'm very, very thankful."
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He continued, "I'm a little, little kid my dad wins something at a raffle, and he brings it home and it's this little black and white TV." Keaton added he was in shock at the new technology from ages "maybe 5 to 10, I could not take my eyes off it, it was magic."
"I watched all the cowboy shows and all the comedies, the gangster shows," he said, "and I would go, and I would reenact these scenes or create my own scenes and my parents and my brothers and sisters would watch me out the window and to this day, they were never demeaning, they were never dismissive, they never looked down at me, they never made fun of me and in fact they'd ask me to reenact scenes for them."
He added, "My parents were not exactly patrons of the arts, we weren't patrons of anything frankly but I want to thank them and I want to thank all those people, my family, for never making me feel foolish because I went on to do that several times myself."
"And that's the thing about feeling foolish and making a fool of yourself, and making mistakes, there's huge power and merit in that," he said. "I'm glad I made a fool of myself over and over again."
"There's one more thing I want to say, over the years there's been some doubters, you know what? we're cool," he said, bringing the audience to laughter. "But I also had those people when times are rough who were the true believers, I f---- love you, man."
Colin Firth (The Staircase), Andrew Garfield (Under the Banner of Heaven), Oscar Isaac (Scenes from a Marriage), Himesh Patel (Station Eleven) and Sebastian Stan (Pam & Tommy) were among this year's nominees.
Keaton was just one of a number of acting nominees for Dopesick, including supporting actor nods for Will Poulter, Peter Sarsgaard and Michael Stuhlbarg, and supporting actress nominations for Kaitlyn Dever and Mare Winningham.
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The 74th Primetime Emmy Awards are being broadcast live on NBC from the Microsoft Theater in ?Los Angeles.