Emmys 2023: Nick Offerman Wins His First Emmy for “The Last of Us”

Nick Offerman, an American actor and comedian, got his first Emmy at the 75th Creative Arts Emmy Awards on Sunday for his role in “The Last of Us”. He was named Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series. In his victory speech, he said, “Fortune gives gifts that don’t follow the rules.” The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences picked the winners for the 75th Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards, which were given to the best artistic and technical work in American prime-time TV shows from June 1, 2022, to May 31, 2023.

Nominations for performances on HBO shows dominated the category. Four actors—Murray Bartlett, Lamar Johnson, Keivonn Montreal Woodard, and Offerman—were in the running for the award, along with James Cromwell and Arian Moayed, who play players in Succession. Offerman also stood up for Cromwell and praised his “magnificent” partner Megan Mullally, who had earlier pushed him to play Bill, a paranoid survivalist who falls in love with Frank (Bartlett), a surprise visitor. When reporters asked Offerman about it, he said that Bill and Frank’s long-term friendship could be the subject of a whole miniseries. He told her, “It could be a musical.”

In episode three of “Long, Long Time,” Offerman and Bartlett played two guys who became friends and fell in love with each other after a disaster that affected the whole world. Outgoing nomad Frank (Bartlett) and shy survivor Bill (Offerman) saved each other and then decided they couldn’t live apart. They went from being cautious friends to lovers over the course of decades. To the tune of the 1970s Linda Ronstadt song that gave the show its name, they found the only meaning left in life in each other, which made fans cry.

People says Bartlett is not only nominated twice this year—he also won an Emmy in 2022 for his role as Nick De Noia, a real-life choreographer, in Hulu’s limited series Welcome to Chippendales—but he’s also a returning winner. In 2022, he won an Emmy for his supporting actor performance in season 1 of The White Lotus. If you count the three nominations she shared with Making It co-host Amy Poehler, this was Offerman’s fourth of the year. (Anna Torv, who co-starred with him and Bartlett, also won an award for guest acting in three episodes, one of which was “Long, Long Time.”)
A brave but doomed brother played by Johnson and Woodard was in the fourth and fifth episodes of The Last of Us. Hughes’s “The Most Wanted Man in Kansas,” Henry, would do anything to protect his younger, deaf brother Sam. He would even risk everything to help Joel and Ellie, travelers with Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey, get away from Kathleen, a powerful woman in the area played by Melanie Lynskey, who is also up for best guest actress.

Cromwell was nominated for a third award for his part as Logan Roy’s (Brian Cox) sarcastic and liberal brother Ewan. He had finished his four seasons on the darkly comedic family drama. In an emotional and biting speech he gave on the spot, he said, “I loved him, I suppose, and I guess some of you did too…. The clouds got a little darker every once in a while. Men’s hearts were closed. To keep a man’s heart warm when another one gets cold, feed that dark flame that burns inside them. Cromwell has been nominated for four more Emmys over the course of his long and successful career. He got praise for his supporting role in American Horror Story: Asylum (2012) and was nominated for two awards for his character roles in ER (2001) and Six Feet Under (2003). He was up for a supporting Emmy in 1999 for his part as newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst in the TV movie RKO 281. Another Succession OG, Moayed, was also nominated in this category in 2022 for his role as the agnostic venture capitalist Stewy Hosseini. His billions kept coming in even though (and probably because of) his loyalty to Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong) changed and whipped like the winds of Wall Street.