Ed Begley Jr. may very well be described as Hollywood royalty: the actor is the son of one other actor, Ed Begley, who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1963.
But the younger Mr. Begley, a longtime member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization liable for awarding the Oscars, commuted to this 12 months’s ceremony like a plebeian by taking the Los Angeles subway. His journey was filmed by his daughter Hayden Begley, who later shared the video on TikTok, where it has since received over six million views.
The film opens with Ms. Begley, 24, asking her mother, Rachelle Carson, Mr. Begley’s wife and Oscar’s guest, how she gets to the ceremony. “I’m driving,” Ms. Carson says, then asks, “What are you?” Off camera, Ms. Begley replies, “I’m taking the subway.” Mrs. Carson, wearing a black lace gown, mutters, “Oh God, never mind,” waving her arms in anger.
Mrs. Begley, in voiceover, explains that she just isn’t attending the ceremony together with her father, then movies his journey to the event on the 240 bus and the B subway.
As Mr. Begley, 74, who has spent most of his profession promoting ecology, while riding a bus, he talks to the camera about his passion for public transport, shows two pins on the lapel of his dark jacket. One pin was shaped like an Oscar statuette and got here from the Academy, where he served on the board for 15 years. He said the second pin, marked with a capital M, was his “subway pin for being a passenger since 1962.”
Later in the video, Ms. Begley movies her father’s full appearance, which incorporates a pair of black Nike sneakers with thick white soles. “Thank God there are people like my dad who don’t mind wearing running shoes on the red carpet,” he says in voiceover.
In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Begley said he bought the Cesarani suit he wore to the Oscars on the set of a production he was involved in many years ago. The clothing items are tailored to the actors and then sometimes sold to them at a reduction, he explained.
“I am not a slave to fashion, as you may have noticed,” said Mr. Begley, who recently published a memoir about his relationship together with his father, who died in 1970, and his life and profession in Hollywood.
The door-to-door journey from the Begley home in Los Angeles to the Dolby Theater took an hour, partly because the closure of the subway station made it obligatory to walk about half a mile, and also because Mr. Begley frolicked posing for photos with fans and others commuters, his daughter said in an interview with The Times.
Ms. Begley, an actress, also works for the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and began working during the recent actors union strike. But she didn’t film her father’s journey on behalf of the agency; she shared a video from her personal TikTok account.
Traveling to the Oscars by public transport has grow to be something of a practice for Mr. Begley and his daughter. They used it to get to the 2023 event, a visit she also filmed shared on social media, in addition to others in previous years. Mr. Begley said that a number of days before the first ceremony they attended, he walked into his daughter’s room and asked her if she wanted to make an announcement. When she replied yes, he told her, “OK, we’ll take the subway to the Oscars.”
Over the years, Mr. Begley has also commuted to the awards show by bicycle and electric vehicle, similar to Bradley’s automobile he and his friend Annette Bening attended the ceremony in 1991. “As a woman in a dress,” he said, “you have to be a yoga master to get out of a car with dignity.”
He added that bicycles and public transport are his favorite, economical and environmentally friendly ways of getting around.
“I never felt like I was wasting my time on a bus or subway somewhere because I was taking a script with me or doing a Jumble or Wordle,” Begley said. “I do the LA Times and New York Times crossword every day.”
