He thanked A24 for backing a bold film, acknowledging that the studio’s willingness to produce material of this kind — smaller, character-driven, not obviously commercial — was itself a form of creative risk-taking that deserved recognition. He thanked Aronofsky, the person who had, in his earlier speech, he had described as “plucking him from the wilderness.” He thanked screenwriter Samuel D. Hunter, calling him the guiding force of the project, the person whose words had given Charlie the shape that made the performance possible.
He addressed his fellow nominees with generous specificity: “Gentlemen, you laid your whale-sized hearts bare.” He said of Hong Chau, his co-star, that her talent ran so deep that “only whales can swim at the depths of” it. He thanked his sons, calling his eldest by name: “I love you, Griffy.” He called Jeanne Moore his “best first mate” and expressed gratitude that she was in his life.
He said, carefully and without self-pity, that his career had not always been easy — that things “didn’t come easily to me” across roughly thirty years in the business. He did not enumerate the reasons. He did not need to. The people in the room and watching from home understood the general contours of what he was referring to without requiring a specific accounting.
The speech was under the normal time limit, which is one of the things that made it distinctive in an awards culture in which speeches are routinely cut off by the play-off music. He said what he had come to say and stopped.