Andrew Garfield Presents Sally Field With Lifetime Achievement Award During SAG Awards 2023

Sally Field has a moment with Andrew Garfield on stage at the 2023 Screen Actors Guild Awards on Sunday night (February 26).

The former Amazing Spider-Man co-stars reunited on stage as Andrew presented Sally with her Lifetime Achievement Award at the bitter end of the award ceremony.

Introducing her, Andrew referred to her as a pioneer in the entertainment industry who “has devoted her life off screen to righteous advocacy.”

“You never drink the Kool-Aid of your brilliance,” he said on stage. “You never get high on your own supply. But tonight we’re going to try to make you.”

Andrew added that “Sally is the epitome of acting greatness — inspired, unafraid of going deep and raw and overflowing with empathy.”

After his introduction, Sally looked back on her career and highlighted some of the biggest moments of it.

Keep reading to read more of Sally’s speech…

“…They opened and revealed parts of myself I would not have known otherwise,” she shared. “I’ve flown on wires and surfed in the ocean, rode on horses, in wagons, trains and fast cars. I had multiple personalities. I worked in a textile mill, picked cotton.”

Sally went on, “I’ve been Mrs. Doubtfire’s employer, Forrest Gump’s mother, Lincoln’s wife and Spider-Man’s aunt. I’ve done scenes wearing 50 pounds of period dresses. I’ve been fully clothed, semi clothed and totally naked.”

She then talked about how her career first started (via Deadline), revealing that Gidget was the project that put her name on a map.

“In the fall of 1964, I was standing in front of a camera on a freezing cold beach in Malibu and I said my first lines of dialogue as a professional actor,” she said. “I was 17, fresh out of high school. I didn’t have an agent, and I was working under what’s called the Taft Hartley Law,” she says. “A few months later, this show was picked up and all of a sudden I was the star of a television series, and I became a member of the Screen Actors Guild. I remember so clearly, putting that little paper card in my wallet, quietly thrilled to call myself an actor. I first found this stage when I was 12 years old in the seventh grade. And after that, I never left the drama department.”

Sally continued, “It was the one place I could be really me, more than any other place when I got off stage. I felt shy and careful and hidden. I would think and rethink everything before I could say or do anything. But on stage, I never knew what I would say or do. I would surprise myself. I wasn’t looking for the applause or attention, even though that’s nice sometimes.”

“Anyway, it’s never been about a need to hide myself behind the characters of other people. Acting, to me, has always been about finding those few precious moments when I feel totally, utterly, sometimes dangerously alive. So the task has always been to find a way to get to that — to get to the work, to claw my way to it if necessary. Struggling to climb my way out of the box of situation comedy in the ’60s and ’70s took a fierceness I didn’t know I had. But honestly, I was a little white girl with a pug nose born in Pasadena, California. And when I look around this room tonight, I know my fight, as hard as it was, was lightweight compared to some of yours.”