The Screen Actors Guild Awards were first handed out 30 years ago—a lifetime in Hollywood. It’s only natural, then, for the ceremony to get a little nip and tuck. Vanity Fair can exclusively reveal that, as of this year, the annual awards show honoring performers in film and television will be known as the Actor Awards, presented by SAG-AFTRA.
This major change comes on the heels of several notable shifts for the event, which most people call the SAG Awards. The SAG Awards ditched cable in 2023 to stream live on Netflix’s YouTube channel, moving to the streamer’s actual platform in 2024. Having increased global reach motivated the guild’s leadership to consider a name that felt more universal. “The evolution of this has been a long time coming,” showrunner Jon Brockett tells VF. “We really want the show to grow beyond just a domestic audience, and I think something simple and straightforward like the Actor Awards is a way to identify who we are very quickly and very easily.”
Conversations about a name change have been percolating since at least 2012, when the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) merged to create a single union called SAG-AFTRA. “We were trying to figure out how we now make it clear that our union name has changed, but that we’re still the same show. And the continuity of it is the actor,” says SAG Awards Committee chair JoBeth Williams.
The new name rolls off the tongue a bit more easily, and is also a logical fit for the show’s priorities. This star-studded event allows actors to honor their peers with a handmade 12-pound bronze statuette that’s also called “the Actor.” The statuette, which features a nude male figure holding both a mask of comedy and a mask of tragedy, has been an emblem of the event since its inception in 1995.
The SAG Awards are considered by many actors to be one of the most important stops of the season. The awards’ winners sometimes surge in the acting races, though just as often this voting body’s choices don’t align with those of the Academy in closely contested races. Just earlier this year, for example, Conclave won best ensemble at the SAG Awards, while A Complete Unknown’s Timothée Chalamet won for lead actor; neither was victorious in the corresponding categories at the Oscars.
