Attendees at Sunday night’s BAFTAs were left stunned as Carey Mulligan was incorrectly named as winner of the Best Supporting Actress award – in an moment that didn’t air on TV.
Mulligan was nominated in the category for her turn in She Said, along with Kerry Condon for The Banshees of Inisherin alongside Dolly De Leon for Triangle of Sadness, Angela Bassett in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Jamie Lee Curtis in Everything Everywhere All At Once.
Last year’s Best Supporting Actor winner, CODA star Troy Kotsur, presented the award using sign language and signed that Irish actress Kerry Condon had won.
However, his sign language interpreter mistakenly said Mulligan’s name.
He told the star-studded crowd: “This is a bad moment”, as gasps sounded around the auditorium in London’s Royal Festival Hall.
After he made the correction, Condon came to the stage and delivered an acceptance speech to rapturous applause.
On stage, she said: “Thank you Martin (McDonagh) for this part, and thank you for all the parts you gave me throughout my career. You make me so proud to be an Irish woman.”
Following the gaffe, which was edited out of the BBC One broadcast, host Richard E Grant joked, “a defibrillator needed for Carey Mulligan”.
Condon wasn’t the only Banshees Of Inisherin star to be honoured on the night, with her co-star Barry Keoghan picking up Best Supporting Actor.
Martin McDonagh won Original Screenplay for the dark comedy, which also won Outstanding British Film.
Elsewhere, All Quiet On The Western Front has broken Cinema Paradiso’s record for the highest number of BAFTAs for a foreign language film.
The German language anti-war epic, directed by German filmmaker Edward Berger and based on the 1929 novel of the same name by Erich Maria Remarque, scooped seven prizes at the EE Bafta film awards, including Best Film and Best Director. It surpasses the record of five set by the Italian coming-of-age drama in 1988.
Taking to the stage at the climax of the event at London’s Royal Festival Hall, producer Malte Grunert said the Netflix film showed how a generation of young German men were “poisoned by right-wing nationalistic propaganda” and he stressed that the film’s message remains “relevant” nearly a century on.
Berger paid tribute to those fighting in Ukraine and also told the audience he was able to get over his “doubt” thanks to his daughter Matilda who had encouraged him to turn the book she was reading at school into a film.
Austin Butler picked up Best Actor for his turn as Elvis in the Baz Luhrmann biopic of the same name, while Cate Blanchett walked away with Best Actress.
