The Crown's Elizabeth Debicki Gives Shoeless Acceptance — and Says Happy Birthday to Mum — at 2024 SAG Awards (2024)

The Crown’s Elizabeth Debicki has been crowned once again!

Debicki won the 2024 SAG Award for outstanding performance by a female actor in a drama series on Saturday evening. With the win, the actress beat out The Morning Show’s Jennifer Aniston, The Last of Us’s Bella Ramsey, The Diplomat’s Keri Russell and Succession’s Sarah Snook.

After she made her way to the stage, Debicki started her speech with an honest — and relatable — confession: "I don't have any shoes on."

"Truly, I was not expecting this. People say that and I really am not. So I don't really know what to say, so I'm just going to wing it," she continued, before thanking SAG-AFTRA and her fellow nominees. "The women in my category, I watch with total awe and I learn how to do my craft watching you. So being nominated next to you is incredible."

Debicki recalled her early acting beginnings, saying, "I really, really love my job. About a week ago, I had the flu and I was, this is what happens when I improv. I was lying in bed. And I had a memory of, I was thinking about childhood. And I was thinking about a happy memory and I remembered the first time that I was ever cast in a play. And it was in my year, I was year five, I must have been 10. I think someone's parent wrote it. I think it was about kids getting along, like, I don't think it was an actual play. Somebody gave me that part on the last day of school and it was a 15-minute walk home and I think I just I levitated home, I was so happy. And I feel like that every time someone gives me a job. So thank you for this. It means so much to me."

Concluding her speech, Debicki gave a sweet shoutout to her costars on The Crown, as well as her mom, whose birthday was also on Saturday.

"To my beautiful Crown family and so many of you here tonight. It is a joy to work with you," she said. "This job is such a gift. It's my mum's birthday. Happy birthday, Mum, thank you so much."

Debicki, 33, portrayed Princess Diana on the final two seasons of The Crown, which focused on the royal’s final days before her fatal car crash in August 1997.

The actress told PEOPLE that the weight of playing Diana for the Netflix series was not lost on her, sharing, “I did a lot of research for this role. I probably spent about a year doing research and that just filled in all these pieces and made me have such deep, deep respect and love for this person who I didn't know so much about.”

She continued, “The battle that she went through in terms of media, public perception. I didn't know things about the divorce and how difficult all of that was for everybody in the family.”

The Crown is also nominated for outstanding performance by an ensemble in a drama series.

Debicki was in good company as fellow actresses Aniston, Ramsey, Russell and Snook were also up for the coveted prize.

Aniston reprised her role as Alex Levy on the third season of The Morning Show opposite Reese Witherspoon. The actress, 55, told the Los Angeles Times in 2020 that the Apple TV+ series was “20 years of therapy wrapped into 10 episodes,” adding, "There were times when I would read a scene and feel like a whole manhole cover was taken off my back."

Aniston — who is no stranger to public scrutiny in her everyday life — said that playing a famous figure in the series was a "cathartic" experience.

"Also interesting for me to look at how I always have tried to normalize being fine and ‘everything’s great, you know, this is all normal,’ and then there are moments when you have your private breakdown or your ‘Calgon, take me away’ moments,” Aniston said. “To actually look at it from an actor brain observing it and acknowledging it, I had to look at it as opposed to pretending it doesn’t exist.”

Aniston's costar Billy Crudup is also up for outstanding performance by a male actor in a drama series while the show scored a nomination for outstanding performance by an ensemble in a drama series.

Ramsey, 20, stars as Ellie Williams, a teenager who is immune to the fungus that has turned the world into a post-apocalyptic landscape filled with "infected" on The Last of Us. Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal) is a smuggler on a journey to deliver Ellie to a rebel group in the hope that her immunity can save civilization.

Ramsey — who identifies as non-binary and uses they/them pronouns — ended up getting so into character that it became hard to distinguish where Ellie stopped and their real self started.

"People always ask, at the end of a shoot day, how I get back into being Bella," they told The New York Times. "But I didn't know how to do that with Ellie because we were so intertwined."

During an interview with The A.V. Club, Ramsey said it was "scary" to finally put the project out into. "It's something that feels very personal to me. I think about everyone who's watching it, everyone who's so invested, it feels, yeah, like a very personal thing," they shared. "So, it's bizarre, in a way, to share it with the world. But it's a joy at the same time that people have been responding so well to it and being inspired by it and by the story like they were initially in the video game."

Pascal is also nominated for outstanding performance by a male actor in a drama series while the show is up for outstanding performance by an ensemble in a drama series.

In the first season of The Diplomat, Russell starred as Kate Wyler, the new U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom who was forced to navigated the demands of both her job and marriage.

“What I loved is the constant discomfort and sweatiness and nervousness and just overall unpolished quality of her — matched with the bossiness to everyone, which I think is really funny,” Russell, 47, told Tudum of taking on the role of Kate.

However, she did wish that Kate wasn’t so talkative, saying, “And the thing I don’t like is how much she has to say. I would love to not ever have to speak. I could just mime my scenes.”

Snook, 36, returned as Siobhan "Shiv" Roy for the final season of Succession, which saw the death of Logan Roy (Brian Cox) leaving the fate of the Roy family and the ownership of Waystar Royco in limbo. The series concluded with Shiv's husband ​​Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen) becoming the company’s new CEO.

Following the series finale, the actress reflected on saying goodbye after four seasons, writing on Instagram, “It’s hard to express what this show has meant to me. The places I got to go, the immense talent I got to work with ... it breaks my heart that it is all over. But my heart had to be this full of all the memories, good times, challenges and triumphs, to be able to break at all ... so that makes me grateful.”

“To have been blessed to join this crazy adventure of a show will be a career highlight, which will no doubt be hard to top,” she continued. “I am so, so proud and humbled by everyone’s hard work season after season: we all set the bar high for each other, then exceeded it and excelled, in every department. The friendships, the scripts, the locations, the one liners, the early mornings, the last minute changes, all the highs and lows: I’m going to miss it all. The people of this show are a talented bunch, and I’m proud to have worked alongside them, it’s the people I will miss most of all.”

She concluded, “I just watched the final episode of the final season of something that has changed my life. And now, my life has changed again. Thank you for all the love and support.”

Cox, Macfadyen and Kieran Culkin are all up for outstanding performance by a male actor in a drama series while Succession scored a nod for outstanding performance by an ensemble in a drama series.

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See PEOPLE's full coverage of the 30th annual Screen Actors Guild Awards as they stream live on Netflix.