In a move to give a Hollywood guild award a more mainstream spin, the Screen Actors Guild Awards have changed their name to The Actor Awards Presented by SAG-AFTRA, the organization announced after a board meeting on Friday afternoon in Los Angeles.
The new name, which is based on the fact that the statuette presented to winners is known as “The Actor,” will take effect at the upcoming ceremony honoring performances from the films of 2025, which will be held on March 1, 2026. To avoid confusion in the awards season that has already begun, for-your-consideration campaign materials will continue to use “the SAG Awards” or “the Screen Actors Guild Awards” through nominations voting ending in early January. The guild is advising studios and networks to switch to “the Actor Awards” in final voting.
A FAQ posted on the awards website explains the change this way: “Since the show started over 30 years ago, our iconic statuette has always been called The Actor®, and simply evolving the show’s name to align with the award itself made obvious sense. We wanted to provide clearer recognition in terms of what the show is about for our domestic and global audiences — we honor actors in film and television. Laser-focusing the name on those two things became the clearest and most straightforward path for this new chapter of the show.”
After 28 years of being broadcast on NBC, then TNT, then TNT and TBS, the SAG Awards moved to Netflix in 2023. According to the FAQ, the move expanded the show’s international audience and made the time seem right for a name change that had been under discussion for years.
The SAG Awards had been one of the four major guild awards that were considered key precursors to the Academy Awards, along with the Producers Guild Awards, Directors Guild Awards and Writers Guild Awards. With its broadcast and then streaming deals and with categories restricted entirely to actors, the show had by far the highest visibility of any of the major guild awards, and is looking to clarify its identity for casual viewers who might not know that a SAG Award is an acting prize.
“As an actor and a longtime SAG-AFTRA member and chair of the Awards Committee, I’ve always loved that our show is actor focused — actors voting for actors — because we understand innately the work that goes into a performance,” JoBeth Williams, former president of the SAG-AFTRA Foundation, said in a statement. “The Actor Awards makes that crystal clear to audiences everywhere: when they tune in, they know they’re going to see their favorite actors celebrated by those who truly know the craft.”
“This new name is a perfect next step in the show’s evolution,” Actor Awards showrunner and executive producer Jon Brockett added. “The Actor Awards presented by SAG-AFTRA gives viewers in 190-plus countries an immediate understanding of who we are and what we’re about.”
