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Awards season is hard for everyone. It’s hard for the people organising the awards, because there are now so many award ceremonies compressed into such a brief window that it’s difficult to stand out. It’s difficult for the people who are nominated for the awards, who either have to show up with a new and interesting acceptance speech every time, or settle into a sustained pattern of repeated failure. It’s hard for journalists, who have to cover the awards. It’s hard for readers, who have to keep reading about them.
But nobody, nobody on Earth, had a worse awards season than Andrew Scott did in 2020. This is the year that he found himself nominated for outstanding actor in a comedy series at the Screen Actors Guild awards, for his role as the priest in Fleabag. It wasn’t bad because he was clearly the underdog, up against household names such as Michael Douglas, Alan Arkin, Bill Hader and Tony Shaloub. No, it was bad because he spent the ceremony passing a kidney stone.
“I was beside Phoebe [Waller-Bridge], and Laura Dern had just won best supporting actress and we were standing up,” Scott told Variety on the red carpet of this year’s Sag awards. “I don’t know if anyone has ever experienced having a kidney stone before, but it sends you, the pain is so immediate.”
Indeed, things got so bad that Scott had to leave during Dern’s speech, and found himself “in the back [of the room] … writhing around in agony”. Eventually he left the ceremony in an ambulance.
The answer to the next question you have is both yes and no. Yes, the Sag awards were recorded on a permanently available video that year, but no you don’t see the moment where Andrew Scott’s entire world caved in on him. However, at least the video affords us a nice little play by play of the night.
Fortunately for Andrew Scott, his category was the first to be announced that evening, just eight minutes after the ceremony began. In the video, he is afforded just two closeups. The first comes after his name is announced as a nominee. Is there a sense that he’s about to experience the worst pain of his life? Hard to say. Yes, he’s hunched and slightly pained-looking as the camera falls on him, but that could just as easily be nerves or embarrassment as much as it is large crystal scraping agonisingly down the interior of his ureter. Still, at the very least he affords a smile.
The second closeup comes moments later, after he loses the award to Tony Shaloub. Here he looks both happy and magnanimous, as any good awards show loser would. In retrospect this is a missed opportunity. Not many people have the chance to immediately react to the loss of a coveted award by screaming in pain, breaking out into a flopsweat, vomiting on the floor and passing out. Had Scott done this, the whole world would have understood.
Four minutes after that, Waller-Bridge wins an award for Fleabag. While the attention is rightly on her, the camera does show Scott hugging Waller-Bridge, then standing up and whooping. I am by no means an expert, but it does strike me as a whoop of excitement and not of searing pain.
Nine minutes later, the entire cast of Fleabag finds itself up for best ensemble. Again, Scott is front and centre; still a little hunched but with no obvious signs of distress. When The Marvelous Mrs Maisel won, and Alex Borstein declared that she voted for Fleabag to win, we see Scott smiling once more, with no idea of what’s about to hit him.
That would happen around three-and-a-half minutes later. Laura Dern’s award is announced next. By Scott’s timeline, then the moment Dern stood up to make her way to the stage is the moment when the stone hit. Moments later he’d be ushered backstage and, ultimately, driven to hospital in an ambulance. Fleabag makes just one more appearance in the ceremony, an hour later as Waller-Bridge presents an award, but ultimately that’s it.
Obviously there are two ways of looking at the whole incident. The first is that it is a terrible thing to have to endure such gruesome pain on what should be one of the biggest nights of your career. The second is that, wow, Andrew Scott really timed that kidney stone to perfection. He stuck it out for just long enough to see his categories, and then got to completely miss out on the rest of the ceremony. The other attendees must have been so jealous as they saw him loaded into an ambulance, knowing that they had to endure another hour-and-a-half of interminable awards guff. He might not have won the award, but by having a perfect excuse to leave early, that kidney stone made Andrew Scott the real winner of the night.
