“Give me a call back, HBO!” 

Brittany Allen says with a smile, on a Zoom call from the Pasadena backyard where she lives with her husband and raises their 3-year-old son. The cable network hasn’t been in touch since she learned, through her now-former publicist, that she would not be part of its Emmy submission package for the medical drama “The Pitt.” 

So she submitted herself.

Allen plays Roxie, a dying wife and mother who arrives in the trauma bay during the show’s second season. The role was written for six episodes, then two more were added, and Allen spent weeks unsure whether she would surface in what would have been Roxie’s eighth, lying in frame as a body after the character succumbs to cancer. Had that scene aired, it could have pushed her past the threshold for guest drama actress and forced her into supporting drama actress, where she would compete against reigning champion Katherine LaNasa and contenders Sepideh Moafi, Taylor Dearden and Isa Briones.

“I was waiting to see if they would include that scene they had shot,” Allen says. “When I saw that they just had her pass away off camera, first of all, I thought that was a beautiful decision creatively. And then it opened the door for me to be eligible, which was, oh my God, exciting.”

The math can be unforgiving for a guest appearance. 

To compete in an Emmy guest acting category, a performer must appear in less than 50% of a show’s eligible season episodes. Any actor previously nominated or who won in a lead or supporting category is also barred from submitting in a guest category for the same role. The stakes of that line are not hypothetical, as seen in 2016, when veteran character actor Peter MacNicol received a guest comedy actor nomination for HBO’s “Veep,” only to be disqualified weeks later when an additional appearance put him in exactly half the season’s episodes. Seventh-place finisher Peter Scolari (“Girls”) received the nomination in his place, going on to win the category.

Self-submitting is not unusual. 

The Television Academy charges a processing fee plus a per-person entry fee for individual achievement categories, with active and associate members eligible for a limited waiver on up to two entries. For a performer whose studio has passed, the practical effect is that the actor absorbs the cost of staying on the ballot.

What’s interesting is that this concept and submission process are not foreign to Allen. 

In 2011, she was a cast member on the soap opera “All My Children,” playing Marissa Tasker Chandler. “During the submission process, I actually was no longer on the show, and it was a real story of redemption,” she says. “I had been on the show for about a year and a half, and then the fans didn’t take to the character, so, as they do in soaps, I left the room one day as Marissa and another actress entered the room the next episode as Marissa. It was kind of the epitome of the highs and lows of this career. But then I did submit myself, and a year after finishing on the show, I ended up winning.” 

That run earned her the Daytime Emmy for outstanding younger actress in a drama series. 

Is Allen the “Queen for acting self-submissions?”

“You have to fight for yourself. You have to believe in your work, and you can’t expect other people to do that for you,” she asserts. “The industry is built on hype, and if nobody is creating that hype for you, you have to find a way to do it yourself. I’ve always focused the majority, if not all, of my efforts on evolving my craft as an actor. That’s the most important thing, and it’s taken me a lot of years to realize that, that alone will not necessarily advance your career.”

It almost reads like a page from the Andrea Riseborough playbook.

Riseborough was the beneficiary of a grassroots campaign that landed her a best actress nomination for the indie drama “To Leslie,” which grossed only $27,000 at the box office. When told of the comparison, Allen lights up. “That’s one of my favorite movies of the last few years.”

Allen is doing what she can on social media. Her bid is on Instagram, where on June 15, she shared an FYC graphic with the caption: “Kind of surreal to be in Emmy consideration…and since HBO didn’t submit me, I’m running my own FYC campaign.”

She went on to thank her casting directors, Cathy Sandrich Gelfond and Erica Berger.

She promises she’s not bitter or holds grudges from the network that brought her “Six Feet Under,” which she says helped her during the death of her grandmother.

“HBO definitely has the challenging task of choosing from so many amazing performances on ‘The Pitt,'” she says. “I’m in awe of the choreography and the casting and the balancing of all of these incredible humans existing in this world. HBO put forward a few guest stars who all did fantastic work. But in terms of a conversation with them, there hasn’t been much between me and HBO.”

Taking a bet on yourself has occasionally paid off, which HBO knows intimately. 

In 2019, the final season of HBO’s fantasy juggernaut “Game of Thrones” arrived to divided reactions, yet the show went on to a historic 32 nominations, the most for any program in a single year. Among them were three performers HBO had not submitted, who entered themselves: Alfie Allen (Theon Greyjoy) and Gwendoline Christie (Brienne of Tarth) landed in the supporting drama races, while Carice van Houten (Melisandre) was nominated for guest drama actress. These presumed long-shot performers are entered by their reps or themselves every year. However, it is far rarer for those entries to convert. Another example came in 2018, when Kelly Jenrette earned a guest drama actress nomination for her role as Annie in Hulu’s dystopian drama “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

This year, 1,573 submissions are in contention across the 17 performer categories, down from 1,706 in 2025, a decline of nearly 8%. Prime Video’s superhero satire “The Boys” (which, coincidentally, Brittany Allen had a three-episode arc on in 2019 in the first season) and NBC’s sketch staple “Saturday Night Live” drew the largest submission hauls of any series, with 28, followed by “The Pitt” with 24. Of those, 15 came from the studio and nine were self-submissions, including Allen.

The rest of “The Pitt” self-submissions break down by category: Charles Baker and Lucas Iverson in supporting drama actor; Allen, Ramona DuBarry, Irina Dubova, Ayesha Harris (recently promoted to series regular for Season 3) and Cathryn Dylan Ortiz in guest drama actress; and Kevin Brief and Luke Tennie in guest drama actor. Tennie also appears on the ballot as supporting comedy actor for “Shrinking” and guest comedy actor for “Abbott Elementary,” both of which were put forward by Apple and ABC networks.

Allen doesn’t take the omission as a slight. “It wasn’t dramatic. The publicist I was working with at the time made some contact and was told, ‘Oh, these are who we’re submitting.’ You don’t take it personally. You see the facts and decide what you want to do with them.”

The fields she is entering are crowded. Guest drama actress saw the cycle’s sharpest decline, falling to 51 from 77 in 2025, but there will be six nominees thanks to the Emmys‘ parity rule (guest drama actor cleared the 80-submission threshold). She’ll compete against her self-submitting sisters, along with official entries put forward by HBO – Tal Anderson (Becca, Mel’s twin sister) and Tina Ivlev (Ilana).
“There was no conversation amongst those of us who self-submitted, but I’m happy to be in their company,” Allen says. “It’s a straightforward process. I had to pick the episode that I felt best represented my work on the show, give them a logline, a headshot and pay the fee, and that’s about it.”

She submitted “3:00 p.m.,” the episode directed by Shawn Hatosy, who is making his own strategic leap this year. Hatosy won guest drama actor last year for the show’s inaugural outing and has elected to submit in supporting drama actor for Season 2, even though he remained eligible for guest. Across the cast, the actors of “The Pitt” seem to be in a zone of advocating for themselves beyond what is expected of them. Allen agrees.

Then there is the strategy, executed without the million-dollar budget that comes with studio backing. “My partner and I brainstormed about a week ago and thought, OK, how can we churn up some attention again?” she shared. 

Her partner is her husband, Colin Minihan, who is also her filmmaking collaborator and has made four movies with her. She says he’s her “PR team and put this great FYC post together, and that too has garnered some traction just this morning.”

That’s what caught Variety’s attention.

And Allen points out that Emmy winner Sarah Paulson, who’s on the ballot for Hulu’s “All’s Fair,” reposted it. “That’s really meaningful to me, because she’s somebody I’ve always looked up to.”

For Allen, this is a singular opportunity. “The Pitt” is the biggest show she has ever been part of, and because Roxie cannot return next season (barring a sudden supernatural turn), it is her one chance to be associated with a drama that has the ingredients to stand the test of time.

Her message to other actors is simple.

“Always put your craft first. Stand behind your work authentically. In sharing what I have in the last couple of weeks, the most stripped-down version of the work in my self-tape, and then an honest post about self-submitting, I opened myself up to being more vulnerable than just saying, ‘Hey, I’m great, look at me.’ It’s that vulnerability, opening the door to what’s underneath the shiny facade of Hollywood, that I think people have resonated with.”

The only project sitting on her IMDb page is a completed project titled “Grendel.”

“That was a show on Netflix that I was a regular on about five years ago,” she says. “They made the whole show. They were in post for seven months on it, and then Netflix never aired it. So it’s still in this limbo on IMDb, but it’s done.”

For Allen, the campaign is its own statement, regardless of how the nominations land.

Emmy nomination voting runs through June 22.