Chadwick Boseman’s widow, Simone Ledward Boseman, has revealed the speech that she would have given if her late husband had won the Oscar for Best Actor in 2021 for the movie Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.

Many thought that Boseman, who passed away in August 2020 after a long battle with colon cancer, would win the award after his Ma Rainey role earned him posthumous trophies at the Critics’ Choice Awards and the Golden Globe Awards that year. However, he shockingly lost it to The Father’s Anthony Hopkins.

Five years later, as part of an oral history of that night, Ledward Boseman shared with The Hollywood Reporter the speech she had planned to give while accepting the award on Boseman’s behalf:

“I will never stop thanking God for you. Thank you to the most high God. Thank you, [Chadwick’s parents] Carolyn and Leroy Boseman, and your mothers, and your mothers’ mothers. What purity. What honesty. What pain. What a role. What work. What beautiful, intricate humanity. What courage, bravery, fearlessness, honesty, commitment, humanity, strength. A spirit that refused to surrender to despair. What an actor. What an artist. What a cast. What a team. What a vision. Glory be to the most high God. Long live the King.”

Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh, who produced the Academy Awards that year following the pandemic, believed that Boseman would win, so he switched things up a bit. Instead of ending the event on Best Picture as the show often does, he decided to end the 93rd Academy Awards with Best Actor.

“The thinking was that if Chadwick won and his widow came up onstage and spoke, there was nowhere to go after,” Soderbergh shared with THR.

When Hopkins was announced as the winner, the audience was shocked. To make matters worse, he wasn’t there to accept, ending the show rather abruptly.

Despite the disappointment, Ledward Boseman found solace in a message from Ma Rainey producer Denzel Washington. “Denzel gave as his cast gift a dog tag with a cross on it that’s engraved and says, ‘Man gives the award, God gives the reward,'” she shared. “And I think that summed it up really perfectly.”