The Succession actor is an awards front-runner for A Real Pain, but his actual priority is being a dad: “That’s the whole point of life.”
One of the many eccentricities of a modern-day awards campaign is that it can last much longer than the film shoot that put you in contention in the first place. In 2010, I spoke with Mark Ruffalo partway through a monthslong awards campaign for The Kids Are All Right and he said, with some astonishment, “Kyle, I spent six days on this movie”.
Still, most actors are happy to decamp to Los Angeles and stump for their film for several months. (It worked out pretty well for Ruffalo and his movie, since both were nominated for Oscars.) And that’s why I’ve recently seen a lot of Kieran Culkin, who’s considered the supporting actor front-runner for A Real Pain: To tout the movie, he wooed film critics at an intimate dinner at Spago, worked the ballroom at the starry Governors Awards and, on a recent evening in November, met me for coffee at the Sunset Tower bar in West Hollywood.
All of this appears as easy as breathing for Culkin, who is chatty and clever and charming – gifts that were put to good use during his run on the HBO series Succession, which concluded last year and earned him an Emmy. But on the day I met up with the 42-year-old actor, he was nevertheless frustrated: His most recent press tour meant that he would have to miss a parent-teacher conference back home in New York.
“My wife was like, ‘We can postpone it and do it over Zoom,’ and I was like, ‘No, no, do it the right way, when they scheduled it. Go,’” Culkin said. “I want to be the one that can go off for a weekend and do work but also be the parent-teacher guy. But I think I’m getting to the place of having to accept that I can’t always get home.”
Family is important to Culkin, who grew up in New York with seven siblings (including his brother Macaulay, of Home Alone fame) and now lives there with his wife, Jazz Charton, and their two children. He readily confesses that he tried to pull out of A Real Pain when its shooting dates were changed, since the revised schedule meant that his wife and children would be able to visit only at the beginning of filming in Poland, leaving him without them for nearly a month.
“I was like, ‘I can’t be away from the family for that long,’ and I had a flip-out,” he said.
It’s fortunate that Culkin was persuaded to stay since it’s hard to imagine A Real Pain without him. In it, he and Jesse Eisenberg, who also wrote and directed the film, play once-close cousins who reunite for a trip through Poland in an effort to better understand their late grandmother, who grew up there. Since her death, Culkin’s Benji has been unmoored, and he was never all that moored to begin with: Benji is charismatic and confounding in equal measure, given to wild mood swings that vex his cousin David (Eisenberg).
Benji could either be the life of the party or suck all the oxygen from a room, and what’s so compelling about Culkin’s performance is that those moments feel both unpredictable yet entirely in character. To make it work required more spontaneity than Eisenberg expected, Culkin told me. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.
Q: What did you make of A Real Pain when the script first came to you?
A: I was laughing really hard out loud, which hardly happens. It was such a tight, wonderful script that I didn’t need to do homework because there weren’t any holes for me to fill in. I just wanted to show up and not rehearse and not think about it because the character’s spontaneous and surprising. I literally would not say the dialogue out loud until we were shooting.
Q: Not ever?
A: I never said it once. I wouldn’t look over the scenes the night before or the morning of. On the way to set, I would go, “What scene are we doing? Great.” I’d learn the lines really quickly in my head, then do a take and just be like, “Oh, I guess that’s what happens in the scene? I didn’t know that.” But this character lends itself to that. I can’t do that with everybody.
Q: You can’t do it with every project, but I know that on Succession, you had a lot of freedom, too. Before those two projects, was your approach more by the book?
A: I was more like it is in theatre, where you stick to the words. But after a while on Succession, I felt like I had a certain ownership, and (his character, Roman Roy, is) the kind of guy who can talk his way out of or into any situation. So I took the approach with learning the lines quickly: I’m not going to think about it, I’ll try something. Take 2, I might be on the other side of the room. Take 3, I might not even enter the scene, which I did once.
There was one take where (Nicholas Braun, who played cousin Greg) walked in and said his line and I didn’t respond, I just looked at him. So he just went to the next line and I just kept looking at him, and he kept trying to get me to chime in. I just washed my hands and started drying my hands in his shirt, and they left that part in. It was a fun way to play with it and they let us play.
Q: Even before you were able to work so spontaneously, did you see acting as a source of play?
A: That’s interesting. Maybe when I was a kid, yeah. My wife made fun of me 10 years ago because I was tired, I was like, “Guys, I’m stressed, I’ve got to go to work.” She went, “Work? I have to go to work. I’m going to an office and working a job, you’re going to go pretend to be someone. It’s literally called play.”
Q: So if you had gotten A Real Pain before Succession, which helped teach you that state of play, how different would your performance be?
A: Probably very. I remember thinking, “I’m going to have to go back to the way it’s going to be, and I’m probably going to get frustrated with T marks on the ground.” We didn’t do marks in Succession. The cameras were somewhere, you just did it. It was very free.
Jesse and I found a rhythm. I tried to completely give myself over to his way and it didn’t work, and he tried to give over to my way and that didn’t really work. I was like, “Can we not do the mark?” And he’s like, “What’s wrong with the marks?” So we had to find a new rhythm for it, because the character needed to be alive and spontaneous.
Q: You do your best work when you’re allowed to break a few rules. At the same time, do you fear that you could be perceived as a difficult actor?
A: Yes.
Q: So how do you find the right balance?
A: By working with the other actors, as long as they don’t mind. If you would ask anybody on Succession, we had a really good rapport and I was never the difficult actor, for sure. We can put our money on that one.
Q: In A Real Pain, your primary scene partner is Jesse, who’s also the writer-director. How does that affect your dynamic?
A: The tough part is getting notes from an actor, because an actor’s not supposed to look at you and go, “It’d be better if you do it like this.” That’s a huge faux pas, you get smacked in the mouth for that, and every time he did it, it threw me: Literally, my chest would pop out, and I’d clench my fist and be in a defensive stance, and be like, “Is this (expletive) telling me how to do it better? Because I got notes for him, too.”
Then I’d realise he was actually really good at it: He would know what the exact little solve was for the scene if it wasn’t working. He’s also really fun to play with. Let’s go back to play, because that is what I think it is when it’s at its best. I’ve heard some people approach the acting thing as being almost like a fight or something: We go to our corners and then we come out and we duke it out in the scene. I have a totally different philosophy.
Q: Some directors like to foment that adversarial atmosphere between the actors.
A: That’s frustrating because it’s treating the actors like children. You don’t have to create tension on the set – actors can make that up. Perfect example is you cannot find two people more dissimilar to their characters than Sarah (Snook) and Matthew (Macfadyen) as Shiv and Tom (in Succession). The tension that they build in character, it’s so powerful, it’s so real, and the two of them are the loveliest people and the best of friends. It shouldn’t be a fight. But if it has to be, try not to lose.
Q: A Real Pain came to you as you were about to shoot the final season of Succession. Did you take it because you had an idea of how you wanted your career to look after that show?
A: No, I don’t strategise, I don’t think that way at all. And also by the way, the entire time we were shooting Season 4, it was a debate as to whether or not it was the last season.
Q: I heard that Jesse Armstrong, the creator of Succession, didn’t tell anyone it was the end until the table read for the final episode.
A: That’s exactly right. He said at the start of the season, “There might be one more, I don’t know yet.” He kept HBO on their toes, other writers, every producer, everyone. It was one guy having to make the decision.
He told me the whole scope of the story, which I never wanted to know in any other season, and when he told me the end, I was like, “That really does sound like the end of the show.” He goes, “It does, doesn’t it?” And he goes, “But,” and then he gave me three different ideas of what Season 5 could look like. I was like, “Oh, I see, there is a way through. Oh God, that’s so cool.”
But when he made the announcement, I felt relieved because there was no longer a question. It was definitely the right call. He’s not the kind of guy who would have pushed it if it was wrong.
Q: When the Succession finale aired, you were in Poland working on A Real Pain. How did you feel?
A: I would have liked to have been home watching it. I got to watch seven episodes before I left for Poland, and part of me was thinking, “I’ll wait until I get home” (to watch the finale). And then it just hasn’t happened and I’m really still frustrated.
Q: Do you think it ever will happen?
A: A couple of months ago, we were on a vacation and I said, “When we get home and get settled, I think I want to watch it, but I might want to go back a couple of episodes.” And she (Charton) goes, “Why don’t you just go back to the beginning?” I had to wrap my head around it: “That’s a big task, it’ll take us a few months. But let’s do it.” And we haven’t started.
We don’t get much time to watch TV and when we do, we have to agree on the show. So something new will come out and it’s hard to prioritise the show we’ve already seen. When we thought we were going to watch Succession, the next season of The Boys came out – we were like, “Got to watch that first.”
Q: You haven’t been on a set since A Real Pain wrapped. There are other actors who go nuts if they’re not constantly rolling into the next project.
A: That, to me, is very weird. I’ve also been told that there are people that get really bummed if their movie doesn’t do well. I don’t understand that.
Q: You don’t care if your movie does well?
A: Of course not, that’s not my business. If I were the producer, maybe I would care, but my business was to show up on set and do the job. What the response is has nothing to do with me, so I think it’s weird.
Q: Many actors believe that success reflects on them and affects their own star image.
A: If you’re going into it worrying about your star image, then you’re probably off to a very different kind of pursuit than I am. I’m not pessimistic about this, actually: I think most good actors that I see, successful ones, are earnest and approach acting because they want to do it.
Q: I wonder if because you were so exposed to your brother Macaulay’s fame when you were younger, it made you less desirous of that.
A: Maybe, yeah. I don’t personally know anybody that has hit a level of fame that likes it. I have a friend who became famous overnight and his horror story was realising, “Oh, it’s too late. I [expletive] my life.” He had to make adjustments in his life to figure out how to be OK with the fact that he’s famous, and he’s doing all right now, actually. But I remember when he told me that story years ago, I was like, “Oh man, I hope that never happens to me.”
Q: Fame can dramatically circumscribe your life, though I do understand why people might think they want it. It’s a very human thing to want to be known, seen, and understood. And if you’re an actor, you can extrapolate that on the biggest possible scale, which is fame.
A: People want to be understood, but I don’t really understand why people want to be known. People’s lives do get smaller and it’s not a nice thing. I did have a somewhat unique perspective of having been around it my childhood, watching that being like, “Oh, I get it. That sucks.” But then, it suits some people.
Q: More than most actors I talk to, you seem to prioritise your life over work.
A: Yeah, for example, I was in Warsaw and I asked for one less day of press so I could go home for a day. I was home for 32 hours – and I was sick the whole time, so the trip was pointless – but I just needed to be home and see the kids. The work is so I can be home, not so I can be at work.
That’s why with this movie, I was like, “Why did I say yes to this? There’s no money here, I don’t see how this is going to benefit me or my family in any way.” I don’t have the same mentality of when I was 26 and single, being like, “I’m going to Shreveport to do a movie for a few weeks, who cares?” Now I have to go, “Where does it shoot and for how long? Can I bring the family? When, because are my kids going to be in school?” All those things matter before I even start the conversation of will I do it or not.
Q: Do you consider yourself ambitious?
A: No.
Q: Never were?
A: For work, no. But I think I aim high when it comes to other things. I took a shot at the most beautiful and charismatic person I’ve ever known and she said yes to a date with me. Now I’m married to her, so I aimed pretty high there and I ended up with my best friend and a great person. I have two beautiful kids and I want to be the best dad ever, so I work really hard at that.
Q: So whatever accolades come your way because of your career or this role, you can put them in perspective.
A: That stuff is nice, but the real stuff is me being home with my kids, when I’m reading them books and singing them songs until they go to sleep. That’s the whole point of life. The rest of it I’m doing so I can get back to that.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Kyle Buchanan
Photographs by: Sam Hellmann
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