Most child actors don't make the transition to adulthood on the big screen. Sure, there are exceptions, but for every Jodie Foster there are a dozen Shirley Temples. At 10 years old, Macaulay Culkin was one of the biggest stars of the 1990s. His brother Kieran, two years younger, was not. She appeared with him in both “Home Alone” films and established his own career in supporting roles as the years went by.
In 2017, he was given a script called “Succession.” The role was for Roman Roy, the youngest of the Roy clan led by media mogul Logan Roy (Brian Cox). Loosely based on Fox News' real-life Murdoch family, the show quickly became a huge hit, catapulting Culkin to center stage playing not a boy, not a teenager, but a man, albeit a spineless one. . At first glance, he knew the writing was solid, but he didn't see an audience for it, including himself.
“While we were filming, I thought, 'Maybe I won't see it, this isn't for me.' And then something clicked,” Culkin tells The Envelope. “The first episodes are good, there is quality, but I don't care about the characters. And somehow, after a few episodes, I started to worry.”
If older brother Kendall (Jeremy Strong) is the Roy family's Fredo, Roman is Kendall's Fredo. Overwhelmed by insecurity and a profound lack of impulse control, he is the show's cringe king, starting an affair with much older in-house legal counsel Gerri Kellman (J. Smith-Cameron), sending shots to his crotch, accidentally sending one to his father. .
Kieran Culkin often played the shameful king as Roman Roy in “Succession,” especially in his scenes with J. Smith-Cameron as Gerri.
(Peter Kramer/HBO)
As the series ends, Roman, along with Kendall and his sister Shiv (Sarah Snook), vie for control of the family business, Waystar Royco, although deep down he knows that he, like his siblings, is unfit. to lead. Logan amplifies the point and tells them, “You're not serious people.”
“I could have raised them better, I could have taught them a little better,” Culkin says of the troubled family dynamic. “In various ways he taught them that emotions were weak and they all handled them in very different ways. And I think Roman was always told to bury it. You can acknowledge that you love someone, but do not show or give them love.”
Emotional impediments take center stage in the middle of the fourth and final season when Logan dies unexpectedly. (No cries of “spoiler” here; after all, the show is called “Succession.”) “Roman convinced himself that he had already suffered a previous bereavement,” Culkin says. “He hasn't been given a moment to accept what happened, how he feels and who he is. I don't feel like he really knows himself, other than being his father's son.”
Although he worked steadily as a child actor, Culkin credits “Igby Goes Down” director Burr Steers for teaching him about the process when he was just 20 years old. “The next big project for me was doing 'This Is Our Youth,' with Kenny Lonergan. ” he says of the 2014 Broadway production co-starring Michael Cera. “I understood the language better and how to play with it. On stage, you're not playing with the dialogue. Without changing a single syllable there is room to play.”
Until “Succession,” Culkin prepared by going off the book and absorbing his character's full arc. But with the successful series, the scripts and changes came so late that he was rarely sure of his lines. “The nature of the writing was very lively but last minute. So I had to completely change my process,” he notes.
Much has been made of Strong Method acting, but Culkin found himself fitting in with all of his co-stars, including Matthew Macfadyen and Nicholas Braun. “Brian worked differently than anyone else. If we did a group scene, we knew the lines but we were encouraged to talk to each other and try it a different way, or not block each other. That would confuse Brian. So we often had to stick pretty close to the script. Then if I have a scene where it's just me and Sarah or me, Sarah, Matthew and Nick, we can play a lot more. With Jeremy there were also moments to play. It wasn't that we had to stick to a certain way, but we did have to adapt to our personal preferences. And now I have to start my next job knowing that they probably won't let me do what I did on 'Succession.'”
Kieran Culkin stars opposite Jesse Eisenberg in the Sundance hit “A Real Pain.”
(Sundance Institute)
Next up was “A Real Pain,” starring and directed by Jesse Eisenberg, which recently premiered at Sundance to stellar reviews. In it, Culkin and Eisenberg play cousins who travel to Poland to honor her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, after her death. The first press had noted differences on the set between Culkin and Eisenberg.
“He had a very definite way of wanting to direct this movie, and I was like, 'I can't even choose my own blocking.' That feels weird. It's his movie, not mine. I don't want to step on his feet. But if I'm hired to do a job, I feel like, to some extent, I should be able to do it the way I want. So I think for a day or two he was a little sensitive about this process. And after a few days we started to adapt a little.”
His recent, albeit delayed, Emmy for Lead Actor in a Drama Series (beating out co-stars Strong and Cox) joins his Golden Globe and Critics Choice Awards wins, well-deserved accolades, though some question whether Roman is a lead role.
“I wanted to change category [to lead], and I got a lot of flack for that,” Culkin says, noting that HBO supported him, but others told him it would hurt his chances that way. “If moving to the other category meant accepting that I wouldn't receive any awards, I was fine with that. Snook and I said we should change two seasons early. She and I changed this year.”
During his acceptance speech, Culkin greeted his wife and promised her that if he won, they would start planning to have more children. Toward the end of our interview, he receives a photo of his children playing in the snow in Central Park and remembers his own childhood with his six brothers and sisters, raised in a single room in the Yorktown neighborhood of Manhattan by his mother (to whom he is grateful in his acceptance speech). “I really wish I was there,” he says, looking at the photo. “Those moments really matter.”
