Jessica Gunning Says Kathy Bates and Jodie Foster Were Among Stars on Her 'Vision Board' as She Beats Them for 2025 SAG Award

Jessica Gunning is once again being recognized for her role in Baby Reindeer!

The actress, 38, took home the win at the Screen Actors Guild Awards on Sunday, Feb. 23 for outstanding performance by a female actor in a television movie or limited series.

With adrenaline pumping through her veins, Gunning began her acceptance speech by looking back at how she began her career in Hollywood.

"When I first started acting, I had an office job alongside acting for about eight years," she said, adding that she had a "geeky" tendency of creating vision boards of the people she wanted to meet and act alongside one day.

Gunning said of her fellow nominees, "Cate Blanchett and Jodie Foster and Kathy Bates were on that vision board, and so to be listed amongst them today, but also alongside Lily [Gladstone] and Cristin [Milioti], who gave performances that absolutely knocked my socks off, really means more to me than I can ever express."

She continued, thanking SAG-AFTRA and the cast and crew involved in Baby Reindeer, "I will never, ever forget being part of Baby Reindeer or playing the part of Martha. It means so much to me."

In Baby Reindeer, Gunning played creator and star Richard Gadd’s stalker, Martha Scott, who develops an unhealthily obsession with him. Gadd wrote the Netflix series based on a real experience, and it has since taken the world by storm.

Gunning won her first Emmy in September 2024 and in January, her first Golden Globe for the role.

Kathy Bates in The Great Lillian Hall, Cate Blanchett in Disclaimer, Jodie Foster in True Detective: Night Country, Lily Gladstone in Under the Bridge and Cristin Milioti in The Penguin were also nominated for the coveted award.

Bates, 76, earned a nomination for playing Edith Wilson in the MAX film The Great Lillian Hall, which follows the story of a Broadway star named Lillian Hall (Jessica Lange) who is battling dementia. Also nominated for outstanding performance by a female actor in a drama series for her part in Matlock, Bates has had an extremely successful career. 

During a panel in July, Bates — who already has two SAG awards under her belt — opened up about her early days of acting, saying she didn’t think she was cut out for the industry at first: "When I was younger, I guess I would get my feelings really hurt," she said, per Entertainment Weekly. "Sometimes I’d get on a plane and fly home."

She began acting in theater in the 1970s before taking on film and television roles, and she recalled being told she needed to toughen up.

"Someone else had said to me around that same time, 'You gotta have a head like a bullet and a heart like a baby,'" she explained. "So that’s what I've tried to do. But sometimes I take it too far and I can be like a bull in a China shop."

Blanchett, 55, was nominated for her starring role in Disclaimer as Catherine Ravenscroft, an investigative journalist who built her career on exposing others’ secrets. When she receives an anonymous manuscript for a book exposing her secrets, her life is upended.

Sacha Baron Cohen and Kevin Kline costar with Blanchett in the AppleTV+ series, and Kline also received a nomination for outstanding performance by a male actor in a television movie or limited series at this year’s SAG Awards. 

She told the Los Angeles Times in November that her biggest hope was that viewers took in all that the show had to offer.

“Well, the most satisfying thing I’ve heard is the fact that you watched it a second time,” Blanchett said. “I can’t tell you the joy and relief that brings me. Because often with episodic storytelling, people either want to binge-watch it, or they’re time-poor, or watch it with two or three other things on board. And there’s so many almost imperceptible details that Alfonso has woven in — and encouraged us to weave into our performances — that hopefully it is rewarding to watch a second time.”

Foster, 62, is up for an award for her role as Liz Danvers in True Detective: Night Country on HBO. Playing a police chief who is tasked with solving the disappearance of eight men in Alaska, Foster has previously described the character as “kind of awful” and “damaged” in an interview on Today.

Night Country was the most-watched of the four seasons of True Detective and got renewed for a fifth season in February 2024. Later that year, in September 2024, the actress won her first ever Emmy for the part, calling the win “an incredibly emotional moment.” 

"They just told us their stories and they allowed us to listen, and that was just a blessing,” she said of the Inupiaq and Inuit people of Northern Alaska. “It was love, love, love and when you feel that, something amazing happens. It's deep and wonderful and it's older than this place in this time. That's just the message, which is love and work equals art."

Gladstone, 38, was nominated for her starring role in Under the Bridge, playing a police officer named Cam Bentland who is investigating the murder of a young girl in canada. The series is based on on author Rebecca Godfrey’s book of the same name and is based on “the 1997 true story of fourteen-year-old Reena Virk (Vritika Gupta) who went to join friends at a party and never returned home,” per the official synopsis.

"I feel like this piece really drew me in because it was another opportunity to have a longer examination of, why do we sensationalize crimes like this and continue to dehumanize the victim?" she explained of why she took the part in an April 2024 interview with PEOPLE.

In 2024, Gladstone made history when she became the first Indigenous American to win a SAG award, which was for best female actor for her role in Killers of the Flower Moon.

Milioti, 39, starred as Sofia Falcone, the daughter of a famed criminal, in HBO’s The Penguin. She took home a Golden Globe in January for the part, where she revealed that a “gut alarm was firing on all cylinders” when she first read the show’s script.

"I was like, 'I need to play this. I love this character so much.' And I'm so lucky that it worked out,” she said. "And so to see what it's done and to see the amount of people it's reached, it's just been... Yeah, it's been incredible.”

She added that she "would love it” if she was asked to reprise the role for another season.

Milioti’s costar, titular character Colin Farrell, is also up for a SAG award for outstanding performance by a male actor in a television movie or limited series.

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See PEOPLE's full coverage of the 31st annual Screen Actors Guild Awards, airing on Netflix.