Where the Heck Do Stars Really Keep Their Awards?

And she’s not alone in searching for a spot to house her hardware. Not all stars have a trophy case or mantle or even a shelf dedicated to their achievements. 

Some celebs see their award behavior as an act in humility, stashing their Tony or Grammy or Golden Globe or even Oscar in the, uh, s–tiest of places. Others have passed it off to their parents, either as a show of gratitude for all the work they put in to helping achieve their dreams or because they don’t quite trust themselves to be responsible for its safekeeping. And, actually, a few aren’t entirely sure where their statuettes are at the moment. 

But they’ve all got a story. So before the trophies get handed out at the Feb. 28 Golden Globe Awards, see what happened after these stars thanked the Academy, the Hollywood Foreign Press and a room full of their couture-clad peers. 

Now that‘s a statement necklace. Though the Walk the Line lead flirted with the idea of turning her 2005 Best Actress Oscar into a piece of jewelry or a very showy door knocker, “Neither one of those options was very practical,” the star, who nabbed a Golden Globe for the same role, admitted to People. “I just keep it in my living room.” 

Any time the actress needs to clear her head, she pays a visit to the statue she claimed in 1970 for her supporting role in Cactus Flower. “My award is in the room where I study and practice meditation,” she explained to InStyle in 2005. “Sometimes it’s on the mantel, sometimes I put it away.” Which makes sense, you know, out of sight, out of mind…

The Jane the Virgin lead has a unique you-break-it-you-buy-it policy regarding the Golden Globe she won for her work on the CW hit in 2015. “It lives on my TV stand. In the box,” she told People. “Any time someone comes over, it’s the first thing they ask.” And while she’s happy to show it off, she admitted she gets nervous each time someone picks it up. “I go, ‘Why are you holding it like that?! Be careful! If you drop it I’ll have your first child!'”

Be he ever so humble, at first, the two-time Oscar winner didn’t want to set out the statues he’d picked up in 1980 for Kramer vs. Kramer and 1989 for Rain Man. By the early aughts, though, he told InStyle that they’d earned a place on his study’s mantle next to his six Golden Globes (including 1997’s Cecil B. DeMille Award). “What made me change?” he asked. “Probably years of therapy! I am proud of them, but they are not what propels me in my work.”

Blame it on the vodka, blame it on the Henny, blame it on the blue top that got you feeling busy, but Foxx didn’t feel entirely comfortable keeping his 2004 Oscar for Ray at his 40-acre California estate. “My manager holds the Oscar. He keeps it at his crib,” the actor told InStyle. “I got too much traffic at my house!”

And she is telling you, she’s not going…to stand for any touching of the trophy. “Where I come from, no one has ever seen an Oscar,” the Chicago native told InStyle of her 2007 prize for Dreamgirls. “So I let people take pictures with it—but I do not allow them to touch it. Sorry, no touching the Oscar! It’s the ultimate honor, and I need to protect it.” Not to mention, give the hardware its proper due: The 13.5-inch piece sits atop its own pedestal, said Hudson, “that I keep lit.”  

After Costner finally got over his fear that someone might walk off with the two Oscars he won for Dances With Wolves in 1991, he retrieved them from his underwear drawer and built them a home inside his screening room. Calling it the “perfect spot,” he told InStyle, “As you go to my screening room, you pass posters of movies that have influenced me (Gone With the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, Bridge on the River Kwai). And it feels appropriate that you have to see a movie to see them.”

Wait, you don’t have a Sunday Room? Because that’s where Puff has placed his three Grammys. For those not in the know, he told Us Weekly, it’s “this room that just feels intimate, that just feels like it would be the perfect place to do a photo shoot reading the New York and L.A. Times on a Sunday. I don’t get to use it a lot, but I fantasize a lot about myself being calm enough to sit down and read the papers and have some coffee and just act really sophisticated and look up at my Grammys. I just haven’t gotten to doing that part of it yet.”

TBH, when you have six Tony Awards it can be kinda tough to keep track. “Eh, they’re spread out around the house,” she admitted to Broadway Roulette in 2017. Between them, she and husband Will Swenson “have four kids and two dogs—and the oldest kid is 16 and the youngest kid is 6 months—so you can imagine all of the stuff that’s around our house! We still have more Tony Awards than kids, but we have many more Legos than Tony Awards.”

Well, this certainly brings new meaning to “grab a cold one.” When Hutton nabbed an Academy Award at age 20 for his work in 1980’s Ordinary People his sister “thought that would be kind of funny to put the Oscar in the refrigerator when people would go grab a beer or something,” he admitted. “It’s still there.”  

Not gonna lie, this sounds like quite the s–ty situation. Mere moments after the actress was honored for her work in black-ish at the 2017 Golden Globes, she popped into the ballroom’s bathroom with a pal to change out of her beaded Zuhair Murad and into her Paula Ke after party gown. “I couldn’t get in and out of the dress by myself,” she explained on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. “My friend took me out of the dress. We went into the handicap stall because it had enough room for two of us, laid the dress on the floor, standing there in a G-string and pasties with no service on my phone. She ran out to go get my stylist, I stood there for 20 minutes naked in the bathroom.” Flustered as people began knocking on the stall, she accidentally left her new trophy behind. “I went back in. It had been given to security, and they couldn’t find it. It was so dramatic,” she continued. “It did get returned. I was sweating profusely, but I do have it.”

Bragging just isn’t the done thing, the British actress offered as reason for keeping her Golden Globe in the loo. “You can’t put it somewhere noticeable,” explained the star, who reigned as Queen Elizabeth II on The Crown‘s first two seasons, “because that would be showing off.”

Though sometimes a queen deserves to wear her crown proudly. Colman keeps all three of her Globes—including one for serving as the monarch on The Crown‘s third season—on display. “Cool people put their BAFTAs and things in the downstairs loo but mine are on the mantelpiece,” she told BBC News. And she had a spot all picked out for the trophy she won in abstentia, film commitments keeping her for accepting her win for 2017’s The Night Manager. “Gutted” to have missed out on the chance to party with costars Hugh Laurie and Tom Hiddleston (“I could have got wellied with them all last night”), she was nonetheless pretty pumped that her category had been presented by Kristen Bell and Cuba Gooding Jr. “Don’t wash it! Don’t polish it if they have touched it!” she said. “I’m clearing everything off the mantelpiece, it’s going right in the middle.”

My Week With Marilyn‘s star didn’t want to wait for baggage check after winning a Golden Globe in 2012. After going to the ceremony with her Los Angeles-based bestie Busy Philipps, “She had a very early flight the next morning and carry-on luggage and she was like, ‘I can’t deal, keep it at your house,'” Philipps explained of the Brooklynite. Nine years on, it seems the Dawson’s Creek alumni have adopted a sharing is caring policy. “It’s on our really nice bookshelf,” Philipps told People of her pal’s hardware, “and I love it.” 

This is a mama’s boy we can get behind. Though the The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story star keeps the Emmy and SAG Award he won in 2019 for his portrayal of the fashion designer’s murderer atop his piano (“To remind me of where they all spring from: creativity”), the Golden Globe found an even more special place to hang. After dedicating his win to mom Cerina Bru, the Glee alum gave her the trophy to keep. “It’s narrative of not just being a woman or a Filipino woman, but an immigrant woman coming to this country,” he explained to StyleCaster of honoring his mom, the youngest of seven kids growing up in the country’s Cebu province, “which is a story that millions of people in this country have.”

Somehow we missed this Jane Fonda’s Workout video. Speaking to InStyle in 1998, the acting legend joked of her Academy Awards for 1972’s Klute and 1979’s Coming Home, “What’s great about having won two Oscars is that I can do a workout with them!” Still wed to media magnate Ted Turner at the time, she told the mag that when they met “he showed me his wall-to-wall sailing trophies in an office big enough for a skating rink, I turned to him and said, ‘Honey, I’ve won a few trophies too. Where am I going to put mine?’ So we built a trophy case in Montana and keep them all together.”

The Big Little Lies star literally couldn’t give her two Emmys away. Winning in 2017 for both producing and acting, the actress offered up her precious metals to daughters Sunday and Faith. “I was like, ‘OK, I can put one on your shelf, Sunday, and one on your shelf, Faith, and they’re yours,'” Kidman recalled on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Except her then-10-year-old wasn’t having it. “Sunday didn’t want it,'” she continued. “She said, ‘Oh, I want to earn my own.’ I’m like, ‘You go, girl!'”

How ’bout them trophies? Well, Damon reportedly misplaced his 1998 statue after a flood in his New York City apartment, while his Good Will Hunting cowriter took a more go-with-the-flow approach. “At first the award lived in my apartment in L.A.,” Affleck told InStyle in 2004. “Then I gave it to my mother. I allowed her to hold it hostage in Boston in lieu of a grandson.” After awhile, though, “I stole it back and it kicked around from office to office. I’ve kept it in pretty mundane locations, on desks or bookshelves.”

After nabbing a Best Actress Oscar in 1984 for Terms of Endearment, the five-time Golden Globe winner put that little guy to work. “I live more simply now. I don’t care about clothes, and many of my awards are in drawers or in storage,” she explained years later to InStyle. Her Academy Award, though, lived in her den next to a statue of the Hindu God Siva that she got in India. “Oscar serves a very practical purpose,” she continued of the eight-and-a-half-pound trophy. “When the winds blow through my New Mexico ranch, he keeps The New York Times from blowing away.”

A regular Shakespearean tragedy. Though the actress emerged victorious at the 1999 Oscars thanks to her lead part in Shakespeare in Love, she never truly felt great about her win, telling Contact Music she stashed the trophy “at the back of the bookshelf in my bedroom because it weirds me out.” For whatever reason, she continued, “I haven’t been able to feel really good about it. I just feel sort of embarrassed and it brings up weird, traumatic feelings. It’s associated with a tough time in my life.”

Life’s a beach for the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award the Chicago star picked up a month before giving birth to daughter Carys in 2003. “He’s in our home in Bermuda,” she revealed to InStyle of the island spread she shares with husband Michael Douglas. “I figured that not many Oscars have lived there. Of course, everyone who visits wants a photograph with him.”

Someone turn this into a movie. With the Swedish actress not settled into a permanent pad at the time, she left her 2016 Best Actress trophy for The Danish Girl with a friend in L.A., prompting her pal’s daughter to turn the experience into an adventure. The little girl “has been sending me photos to prove she’s taking good care of him,” Vikander told People. “I love my little updates from her!”

Sounds like Hanks and wife Rita Wilson‘s trophy shelf is a bit like a box of chocolates. You never quite know what you’re going to get. At one point, the actor said his two Oscars (for 1993’s Philadelphia and 1994’s Forrest Gump) were holding court with some soccer awards. Added Hanks, “I think the World’s Greatest Mom trophy from Mother’s Day is up there as well.”

Stone has got her little man covered thanks to an assist from pal Jimmy Kimmel. After hosting the ceremony 2017 when the actress won for La La Land, Kimmel “sent underwear for [my Oscar], like rubber underwear, so he’s wearing tighty-whities,” she revealed to People. “Jimmy said, ‘I’d like to bring some decency into your home.'” Well, her mother’s home, really, Stone sharing that mom Krista “holds on to it.”  

Ridin’ solo: “It’s just on a shelf on its own,” the 12 Years a Slave star told Variety of her 2014 Best Supporting Actress Oscar. But she doesn’t mind sharing the wealth. Asked if friends try to hold the hardware, she replied, “Yeah, and they’re allowed to.” 

As a teen, The Piano actress didn’t want to make a whole song and dance about the Academy Award she won at age 11. “I keep it next to my boots at the back of my closet,” she told InStyle five years after her 1994 victory. “I don’t display it because friends would think they had to comment and I don’t want that kind of attention.”

In the two-plus decades since his 1997 win, the Jerry Maguire actor’s Oscar has aged like a fine wine. For the first six years, the statue sat on a shelf in his temperature-controlled wine cabinet, remaining like new. “Now that I keep it out in the open in my screening room,” he told InStyle, “it has become tarnished—which is kind of cool. It’s starting to age and get character. Like me.”

The Oscar winner has her a man who doesn’t miss an opportunity to pump her up. The Fences lead says husband and producing partner Julius Tennon urged her to keep her 2017 trophy in their office, next to the Emmy she won for How to Get Away With Murder and her two Tonys. “If it were up to me,” she admitted, “I’d keep it in my garage to keep me humble.”

With a small space, the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel actress struggled to find a spot for her best actress trophy to take a seat. Hence why, “My Golden Globe from last year is on my toilet,” she confessed to reporters at the 2019 show after notching her second win in a row. “I live in New York. Truly, it was the only available shelf and it’s cute in there.” Besides, she continued, “It livens up the place. I’ll probably put this one next to it.”

Cross-examined by Ellen DeGeneres about the “parlor” where she houses her 2009 Oscar, the Erin Brockovich actress testified, “It’s in a room that has a piano in it, that my daughter plays, that we call the piano room. I thought it might sound pretentious, so I said ‘parlor.” Responded the talk show host, “So you thought ‘parlor’ sounded less pretentious?”