Tearful Michael Keaton Dedicates Screen Actors Guild Awards Win To Late Nephew

Actor Michael Keaton made a tearful dedication to his late nephew while accepting a Screen Actors Guild Award. You can see his moving speech here:

The 70-year-old star scooped the award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Television Movie or Limited Series for his role in Dopesick - a series about the US’s opioid crisis. 

While accepting the award, he dedicated it to his sister Pam and his nephew, also called Michael. Michael tragically died from a heroin and fentanyl overdose in 2016. 

Keaton could be seen with tears in his eyes during the speech and stopped for a moment, before saying: “Given the subject matter, this is for my nephew, Michael, and my sister, Pam.

“I lost Michael to drugs and it hurts. To my sister Pam, thanks."

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Keaton played the role of Dr. Samuel Finnix in the show, which centres on the aggressive push of painkiller OxyContin - an addictive drug that is blamed for kicking off the opioid crisis in the US that has killed hundreds of thousands of people. 

In his acceptance speech, Keaton said: “There's an argument to be made, it's a legitimate argument, that a night like tonight is self-serving, narcissistic - it's a legitimate argument to be made.

"That said, I'll speak for myself, I am so fortunate. I'm so blessed to do what I do. 

“I have a job where I can be part of a production like Dopesick, that actually can spawn thought, conversation, actual change, who gets to have that job?

"Seriously how fortunate am I that good can come from what I do just because I decided to be an actor?

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“There's massive inequity in the world. In Dopesick, when you talk about addiction, the way to heal the problem is to accept that you have a problem. 

“Not our country, the entire world, economically, racially, socially, financially, there's massive inequity in the world. There just is. There's fair and there's unfair. There's not a lot of room in between. 

“I can feel right now the rolling thunder of eye rolling coming across people saying to me things like, 'shut up and dribble,' 'shut up and act.' 

“The acting I'll quit. The shutting up, not so much. I'm blessed to do something that might improve someone's life.”