Zoe Saldaña Gives Loving Shoutout to Husband Marco Perego as She Wins BAFTA Award: 'You Are So Beautiful!' (2025)

Zoe Saldaña is this year’s supporting actress British Academy Film Award winner for her work in Emilia Pérez.

At the 78th annual BAFTAs ceremony on Feb. 16, hosted by David Tennant, the actress took the Royal Festival Hall stage in London to give a rousing acceptance speech.

“I was told not to cry by my children so I'm going to try. This is so validating and a true honor,” said Saldaña, 46.

"This was a creative challenge of a lifetime. How do you begin to even approach a film that defies categorization? You start by taking the lead with Jacques Audiard, so thank you very much. I want to thank my very wonderful cast and the crew who poured their hearts into the film," she added.

"I want to thank my mom for being such a selfless person," the actress continued. "Thanks to you I'm able to do anything I want. My husband, you are God's favorite and I hate it — but you are so beautiful!"

Saldaña is mom to twin sons, Cy Aridio and Bowie Ezio, 10, and youngest son Zen Anton, 8, whom she shares with husbandMarco Perego, 45.

Also in the running for BAFTA’s supporting film actress prize this year were Jamie Lee Curtis for The Last Showgirl, Selena Gomez for Emilia Pérez, Ariana Grande for Wicked, Felicity Jones for The Brutalist and Isabella Rossellini for Conclave. Of those, Grande, Jones, Rossellini and Saldaña are also contenders at the upcoming Oscars.

In Audiard's Emilia Pérez, which netted 11 total BAFTA nods, Saldaña plays a lawyer helping a Mexican drug lord (played by Karla Sofía Gascón) transition into a woman. A first-time nominee with the British Academy, Saldaña also earned this year’s Golden Globe and Critics Choice Awards for her performance in the Netflix musical-thriller.

Her costar Gascón, 52, was not in attendance at the BAFTAs following recent controversy over her resurfaced social media posts criticizing Muslim culture, George Floyd, diversity and more. The Spanish actress, who made history as the first openly transgender acting nominee at several awards shows, deactivated her X account on Jan. 31, and apologized after making various statements that drew backlash.

Recognized by BAFTA for the first time, Grande has earned multiple nominations for her work as Glinda the Good Witch in Oz origin story Wicked: Part One, director Jon M. Chu’s adaptation of the hit Broadway musical. Costarring fellow nominee Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba a.k.a. the Wicked Witch of the West, the two-part adaptation will conclude with Wicked: For Good, in theaters Nov. 21.

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Curtis, 66, has a long history with the BAFTAs, becoming a winner in 1984 for Trading Places and earning subsequent nominations in 1989, 2023 and now 2025. In The Last Showgirl, the Oscar winner plays Annette, a Las Vegas cocktail waitress and friend to Pamela Anderson's showgirl Shelly. The Gia Coppola-directed film also earned both stars nominations at the upcoming Screen Actors Guild Awards.

First-time BAFTA nominee Gomez, 32, costars with Saldaña and Gascón in Emilia Pérez as the rebellious Jessi, wife of Gascón’s titular character. The Only Murders in the Building star was one of the movie’s four actresses, along with Adriana Paz, who jointly won a prize at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, where the musical-thriller kicked off its domination of this awards season.

Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist stars Adrien Brody as a fictional architect emigrating from Hungary to America in the wake of WWII, with Jones, 41, as his wife Erzsébet following behind years later. “In part, it’s a love story,” Jones told PEOPLE in December of the epic film. “It’s about these two people who are wanting to make this love work no matter what it takes. I feel like we’re all really desperate for a story of this magnitude.”

Despite decades of screen performances, Rossellini, 72, is making her debut as a BAFTA nominee. In the Edward Berger-directed, Peter Straughan-adapted Conclave, the Italian actress plays the all-seeing Vatican nun Sister Agnes, a role with very few lines of dialogue next to lead actor Ralph Fiennes’ Cardinal Thomas Lawrence. The film led this year's BAFTA list with 12 nods.

See PEOPLE's full coverage of the 77th British Academy Film Awards, airing on BBC One in the UK and BritBox in North America.