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Sterling K. Brown Was Nominated For His First Oscar! What to Know

The This Is Us star received a nod from the Academy Awards for his supporting role in American Fiction.

By Jackie Manno

Sterling K. Brown is now officially an Oscar contender!

How to Watch

Watch This Is Us episodes on NBC.

The This Is Us star was nominated for a 2024 Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for his role in the critically-acclaimed film American Fiction

American Fiction tells the story of a frustrated author, Thelonious Ellison (Jeffery Wright), who writes an exaggerated book based on Black stereotypes in order to appeal to a mass audience. Brown plays the main character's brother, Clifford Ellison, a plastic surgeon struggling with coming to terms with his LGBTQ+ identity. 

Congratulations, Sterling!

Read the full list of 2024 Oscar nominees here

RELATED: Sterling K. Brown Opens Up About Meeting "Cool" Prince William

Brown also has nine Emmy nominations and three wins under his belt, including a 2017 win for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for his role as Randall Pearson in This Is Us. He received his first Emmy a year earlier for his depiction of lawyer Christopher Darden in The People v. OJ Simpson: An American Crime Story, and won again in 2021 for Outstanding Narrator for the docuseries Lincoln: Divided We Stand

Brown posted his reaction to the Oscar nomination on Instagram. Watch, below: 

Sterling K Brown smiling while seated

Sterling K. Brown talks American Fiction 

In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Brown discussed his process behind tackling the memorable character that is Clifford Ellison.

“Coming off six years of This Is Us, it was very important for me to find roles that did not feel Randall Pearson-esque,” he explained to the outlet. “Cliff was a lovely sort of comedic foil. He’s also a person who needs to be dealt with rather than the person who’s dealing with everything. It’s kind of nice to be the dude that has to be dealt with."

RELATED: Sterling K. Brown Revealed the Most Heartwarming Set Memory of Andre Braugher

On the acclaim Brown's received for the role, he said, "I don’t know if I saw this coming. I knew that it was an exceptionally well-crafted story. I knew you had a beast of an actor holding it down in Mr. Jeffrey Wright. I knew that we had a great ensemble and wonderful producers to shepherd this thing through fruition, but that happens a lot of times, and then it just goes by the wayside. Nobody pays attention to it. I don’t ever make the mistake of equating critical and popular success with each other. They can overlap in the Venn diagram of success, but they are not the same thing."