The Critics Choice Award for Best Actor, awarded in January 2023, was among his first major wins. His speech at the ceremony was notable for its directness. He said: “I was in the wilderness, and I probably should have left a trail of breadcrumbs, but you found me.” The line was addressed, partially, to Aronofsky — but it was also broader than that, an acknowledgment of the specific quality of the year’s experience, the sense of being located and recognized after a period of being lost.
At the Screen Actors Guild Awards in February 2023, he thanked his fellow actors for giving him the sense that he belonged to a tribe. He became emotional speaking about what SAG membership had meant to him, what it meant to stand in front of the people who practiced the same craft and have them hand him that recognition. He spoke about Charlie with the specific understanding of someone who had spent months inside the character: a man “on a raft of regrets” who was nonetheless in “a sea of hope.”
The Golden Globe, that year, was not his — and he was not there for the ceremony, having declined to attend in light of his history with the HFPA. The award went to Austin Butler for Elvis, and Butler was widely considered the Oscar frontrunner through much of the season. The race between Fraser and Butler was one of the genuine competitive uncertainties of the 2023 Oscar campaign, and Butler’s BAFTA win reinforced his status as the predicted winner.