Keri Russell and Michelle Williams are Very Xennial Actor Winners

 A few facts about Keri Russell:

She has been working virtually nonstop since she started on The All New Mickey Mouse Club in 1991.  Her performances, especially on long-running series like The Americans and The Diplomat, have been widely praised – in fact, she’s very quietly become one of the most praised performers of her generation, and among the most nominated – virtually every year she’s been eligible, she’s been nominated for an acting performance.

…and last night’s Actor Award was her biggest win since a Golden Globe for Felicity in 1998. !!!

That is, there have been a couple of small wins in the intervening decades – Satellite Awards, TCA Awards – but this is the first time in decades it’s been a big, televised award, selected by her peers, and this is how she chose to commemorate the moment:

@entertainmenttonight Keri Russell uses her Best Actress in a Drama Series win as an opportunity to hype up Rufus Frederik Sewell and the rest of her ‘The Diplomat’ family 🥹#ActorAwards #kerirussell #thediplomat ♬ original sound - Entertainment Tonight

She immediately made it about showrunner Debora Cahn, about her costar Rufus Sewell – and then, not just a throwaway line, but a little behind-the-scenes about how they talk about the rest of the cast when they’re not there – “All of you could have your own show”.  Then finishes with a moment of love for St. David’s day and ‘my Welsh guy’.

Am I glazing, as the kids say? Too impressed by an unremarkable acceptance that’s maybe even too focused on other people? Is this a Xennial-era reluctance to take the glory for herself? Or is it that after so many years, it’s obvious to Keri Russell – long a working actor, but not necessarily a celebrated one – that this is and always has been a team sport?

That’s really what makes the Actor Awards so special (even if the name is still a bit of an eyeroll) – as we’ve noted elsewhere today, there are some surprises; because the actors alone vote on these honors, they come out differently than when producers and directors and (shudder) money people also have a say, and while I don’t want to say it’s more correct, it’s definitely seen through a clearer lens -

I thought the same thing a little while later when Michelle Williams won Female Actor in a Limited Series for Dying For Sex. It came out early in the eligibility cycle and for somewhat obvious reasons didn’t get a huge amount of hype (“Michelle Williams has cancer, but still f*cks!” is, admittedly, a more complex press pitch than some others), but though she’s earned more statuettes than Keri Russell, her acceptance speech was similarly about the people around her:

Once again, she calls out with a moving speech about how as a girl, she assumed her fellow cast members would always be family. Like Keri Russell, she takes the focus off herself and puts it on her costars – Jenny Slate, Rob Delaney, Sissy Spacek, Jay Duplass – but she also, without saying it, but nonetheless consciously, invokes her other onscreen ‘family’:

As so many of us mentioned, the In Memoriams felt like they were full of heavy hitters this year,  but it wasn’t just that they were big names, like Catherine O’Hara and Rob Reiner and Diane Keaton – it was the names that were ours: Eric Dane and Malcolm-Jamal Warner and Michelle Trachtenberg and James Van Der Beek. Names of our generation, not only performers who were gone too soon, but those whose loss is particularly acute because they were our friends and escorts as we explored and ventured toward adulthood. Because they’ve been onscreen almost as long as we’ve been paying attention, they truly feel like peers – which would be exponentially more true for Russell, Williams, and other actors of their generation.

Maybe that’s why the speeches are so poignant and so focused on the community – Keri Russell and Michelle Williams are torch-bearers of the generation that launched our cultural touchstone, The WB – but that same generation is beginning to experience loss – which seems, of course, way too soon. No wonder it’s important to remember everyone around you – that they’ll always be there is, heartbreakingly, no longer true.

P.S - sharp-eyed fans were excited to see Williams sitting with her DICK costar Kirsten Dunst, and I have to count myself as one of them, not just because it’s a great movie that was kind of passed over in it’s day,  but because it’s the one and only film where I appear as an extra ! Screenshot potentially en route because even in heels, I’m a skyscraper relative to when MW runs by me!