Phoebe Waller-Bridge pulls Emmy upset with Lead Actress in a Comedy win

Our prayers to the hot priest worked: Phoebe Waller-Bridge is an Emmy winner again.

The Fleabag star and creator took home the trophy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series at Sunday night’s Emmys.

“I find acting really hard,” she said to a rapturous applause. “Thank you to be nominated with these incredible actresses who I have just looked up to and watched and laughed with. It means so much.

This is the second win of Waller-Bridge’s career — and night. After earlier winning Outstanding Writing in a Comedy Series, she pulled quite the upset considering Julia Louis-Dreyfus is a six-time winner for her run on Veep and Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s Rachel Brosnahan won in 2018.

“I was completely determined not to. But then the character never quite left me,” Waller-Bridge previously told EW of the decision to return for a second season of Fleabag. “I thought the series ended with a proper ending, a catharsis, and a resolution almost — so, I was like, no, and I was really smug about the artistic integrity of that. And then I just thought, god, I have this amazing character who I love and who I could write forever, and I’ll just wait and see what happens if I leave her alone for a bit. And then I just started thinking about what the next step of her life would actually be, and the reality of that, and some people do have to wake up after a perfect cathartic end to their story and get on to the next day. And that’s kind of what happened with her. So that was my justification. And so then she goes looking for meaning in her life a bit more in this one and she sort of gets involved with the church a bit.”

Waller-Bridge had tough competition to win Sunday, beating out Dead to Me’s Christina Applegate, Russian Doll’s Natasha Lyonne, and Schitt’s Creek’s Catherine O’Hara in addition to Louis-Dreyfus and Brosnahan.

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