Jeffrey Wright Sends Love to His Family in Emotional 2024 Spirit Awards Speech: 'I Am Nowhere Without You’

Jeffrey Wright gave a moving acceptance speech at the 2024 Film Independent Spirit Awards.

At the Santa Monica ceremony on Sunday, the actor, 58, became visibly emotional while accepting the award for best lead performance for his role as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison in American Fiction.

After taking the stage, Wright acknowledged the award’s presenter, his Rustin costar Colman Domingo, telling the actor, “To receive this from you, Colman, man, is just a beautiful gift.”

“It’s funny, you go to these award shows, you kind of grow tired of them. And then you get one, it kind of changes the vibe a little bit,” Wright joked.

The Hunger Games alum also acknowledged the "beautiful work" of his company in the category — Jessica Chastain, Trace Lysette, Natalie Portman, Judy Reyes, Franz Rogowski, Andrew Scott, Teyana Taylor, Greta Lee and Teo Yoo.

He then recalled his very first Spirit Awards appearance — a memory that “adds to wonderful memories” of the ceremony, he said.

“The last time, or rather the first time that I was here, the Independent Spirit Awards, I had the opportunity to meet for the first time, Muhammad Ali,” he said, “who was here with his film When We Were Kings and who, of course, was an absolute hero of mine and remains so to this day."

The recipient went on to thank costars Sterling K. Brown, Tracee Ellis Ross, Erika Alexander and John Ortiz, as well as “everyone who worked on this film,” before giving an emotional nod to his family.

“My son is here, Elijah, I love you,” he said, as the camera’s cut to his son, who had been sitting beside him all evening.

"You and your sister and my family are the sun around which I orbit. I am nowhere without you,” he added as Elijah became visibly emotional.

Finally, Wright thanked American Fiction screenwriter Cord Jefferson — who won the Spirit Award for best screenplay earlier in the evening — and Percival Everett, the author of Erasure, which the screenplay was adapted from.

“Percival Everett wrote a beautiful story of a family and of a man facing personal challenges and cultural challenges, some of which are as old as our country,” Wright said. “You only need to look to the news out of what passes as our political sphere to understand that this work continues.”

“But Cord, what you did, at the very least, was to give us opportunity to laugh at the goddamn utter ignorant absurdity of it all and I thank you for that and thank you all,” he finished.

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American Fiction follows Monk (Wright), a Black author frustrated that his books don’t sell well while books filled with racial stereotypes do.

He decides to write a novel under a pen name that parodies the books he sees garnering attention and when it becomes a huge success, finds himself caught up in a web of lies that may have dire consequences.