Timothée Chalamet Surprises as Best Actor Winner at 2025 SAG Awards: 'I Was Not Expecting This at All'

Timothée Chalamet has plenty to celebrate after taking home the prize for best actor at the 2025 SAG Awards.

For his work playing Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, Chalamet, 29, won the honor at the 31st annual Screen Actors Guild Awards ceremony on Feb. 23 at the Shrine Auditorium. He began his speech by thanking his date to the ceremony: his mother Nicole Flender.

"I was not expecting this at all," Chalamet said. "I'll start by thanking my mother who I'm here with tonight. She has been working at Actors Equity for 40 years, the stage union."

Noting that he had prepared to play Dylan for five years alongside A Complete Unknown director and co-writer James Mangold, he continued, "I poured everything I had into playing this incomparable artist, Mr. Bob Dylan, a true American hero. And it was the honor of a lifetime playing him."

Chalamet concluded by shouting out other performers. "I know we're in a subjective business, but the truth is I'm really in pursuit of greatness," he said. "I know people don't usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats. I'm inspired by the greats. I'm inspired by the greats here tonight. I'm as inspired by Daniel Day-Lewis, Marlon Brando and Viola Davis, as I am by Michael Jordan and Michael Phelps, and I want to be up there, so I'm deeply grateful to that. This doesn't signify that, but it's a little more fuel. It's a little more ammo to keep going."

Chalamet has had a busy year after leading both A Complete Unknown and Dune: Part Two. At the 2025 Gotham Awards, Chalamet and Mangold received the Visionary Tribute honor for the biopic, which depicts Dylan in the 1960s. The film also features Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez and Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo.

The other nominees in the SAG lead film actor category this year were Adrien Brody for The Brutalist, Daniel Craig for Queer, Colman Domingo for Sing Sing and Ralph Fiennes for Conclave. 

Brody leads The Brutalist as László Tóth, a Hungarian-born Jewish architect who emigrates to the U.S. to flee the Holocaust. The actor recently won best actor at the 2025 Critics Choice Awards and the 2025 BAFTAs. 

His new historical drama, from director and co-writer Brady Corbet, is one of the most nominated this awards season, including for best picture at the Academy Awards. 

Craig, 56, leads the romance drama Queer, directed by Luca Guadagnino (Challengers), in which he plays an American expat in 1940s Mexico City who falls in love with a younger man played by Outer Banks star Drew Starkey.

Adapted from William S. Burroughs' 1985 novel of the same name, the film marks Craig's second movie role since his last turn as James Bond in 2021's No Time to Die. 

Appearing at the SAG Awards for the second year in a row following his nominated work as Bayard Rustin in 2023's Rustin, Domingo, 55, is racking up awards recognition for his work as the formerly incarcerated John "Divine G" Whitfield in Sing Sing.

The Emmy winner and Oscar nominee’s performance has earned love from the Gotham Awards, Golden Globe Awards, Critics Choice Awards and Film Independent Spirit Awards, in addition to his SAG Awards nod.

Fiennes, 62, plays cardinal Thomas Lawrence in Conclave, which also stars Stanley Tucci and John Lithgow, among others. Adapted from Robert Harris's hit novel, the papal drama imagines a series of twists in the modern-day Vatican City. 

Directed by Edward Berger (All Quiet on the Western Front), the film and Fiennes’ role have been highly praised amid awards season, landing multiple nominations at the BAFTAs, Golden Globes and Academy Awards. 

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See PEOPLE's full coverage of the 31st annual Screen Actors Guild Awards, airing on Netflix.