Niecy Nash got visibly emotional as she thanked herself while accepting the award for Best Supporting Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie at the 2023 Emmys.
“I’m a winner, baby!” Nash, 53, began her acceptance speech on Monday, January 15, before giving thanks to “every single person who voted” and her “better half who picked [her] up when [she] was gutted from this work.” (Nash secretly tied the knot with Jessica Betts in August 2020.)
“And you know who I wanna thank? I wanna thank me,” Nash added as the audience erupted in applause. “For believing in me and doing what they said I could not do. I wanna say to myself in front of all you beautiful people, ‘Go on girl with your bad self.’ You did that!”
Nash ended her speech by accepting her award on behalf of “every Brown or Black woman who has gone unheard yet overpoliced.”
“As an artist my job is to speak truth to power, and baby, I’mma do it till the day I die,” Nash concluded. “Mama, I won!”
Nash was nominated for her role in the Netflix limited series Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story where she played Glenda Cleveland, a neighbor of Jeffrey Dahmer who attempted to warn the police about his killing but was ignored on multiple occasions.
Nash previously told the Wrap that when series creator Ryan Murphy, who she previously worked alongside in 2015’s Scream Queens, called her, she said “yes” before even knowing what the role entailed.
“But when I started to unpack the story, the thing that got me on the hook was that she went so long being unheard,” she said in June 2023. “I thought, what a gift it would be to finally have her at the forefront of this story.”
