The True Winners of the Golden Globes Were the Fun Facts
In the world of awards shows, the Golden Globes is notoriously unserious. There are drinks! There are tongue-in-cheek jokes about how unserious it is! And did I mention the drinks? This year, the awards show really leaned into the chill, casual reputation, peppering its live broadcast with pop-up fun facts about the presenters and winners. The Oscars, Grammys, etc., would never! (But maybe they should …)
As presenters and winners took the stage at the 2025 Golden Globes, the viewing audience was treated to little bits of trivia à la VH1’s Pop-Up Video. Did you know Zoe Saldaña’s go-to karaoke song is “Piece of My Heart,” by Janis Joplin? Or that Auli’i Cravalho is allergic to cats? Well, now you do, and isn’t learning innocuous facts about famous people fun? I mean, it must be. Why else would we reflexively Google a celebrity’s age every time they make an unexpected cameo in the show? For what other purpose does IMDb exist?
Some fun facts were about the nominated work. (Did you know Emilia Pérez was originally written as an opera?) Others were a peek at an actor’s life before the big screen. (Morris Chestnut used to be a bank teller!) Some trivia was clearly pulled from a cursory Wikipedia search. (Jennifer Coolidge’s first acting credit was on Seinfeld; Baby Reindeer’s Jessica Gunning has “an extensive list of credits.”) Some facts were pulled from previous interviews. (Ke Huy Quan was inspired to return to acting after watching Crazy Rich Asians.) But the best bits by far were the ones with no rhyme or reason, no real connection to the industry, no clear explanation for how the piece of trivia really came to be known.
For example, Demi Moore has over 2,000 vintage dolls. Before acting, Andrew Garfield worked at several different Starbucks locations; he kept getting transferred because he was “always caught sitting down by his bosses.” Vin Diesel is passionate about Dungeons & Dragons, and I’m Still Here star Fernanda Torres “considers memes a superior form of art.”
Still, I am left with more questions than answers: Did the Golden Globes writing team assemble these fun facts? Did the celebrities’ teams? What about the unaired fun facts for the other nominees — will those get to see the light of day? Am I meant to just look those up on my own??
If any other awards shows are looking to keep viewers’ attention away from their phone, here are a couple other bits of trivia I’d like to pop up below celebs in any and all future programming: