Supporting Actor front runner Kieran Culkin could rule Oscar season, but he would rather be at home

LOS ANGELES – 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.

Most actors are happy to decamp to Los Angeles and stump for their film for several months, which is why I have recently seen a lot of Kieran Culkin, who is considered the supporting actor Oscar front runner for A Real Pain (2024). He has already won in the category at the Golden Globes, British Academy Film Awards and Critics’ Choice Awards.

To tout the movie, he wooed film critics at an intimate dinner at Spago, worked the ballroom at the starry Governors Awards and, one evening in November 2024, met me for coffee at Sunset Tower bar in West Hollywood.

All of this appears as easy as breathing for Culkin, who is chatty, clever and charming – gifts that were put to good use during his Emmy-winning run as brash scion Roman Roy on the HBO series Succession (2018 to 2023).

But on the day I met the 42-year-old American actor, he was nevertheless frustrated. His most recent press tour meant he would have to miss a parent-teacher conference back home in New York.

Family is important to Culkin, who grew up in New York with seven siblings – including his actor-brother Macaulay – and lives there with his British wife Jazz Charton and their two children, aged five and three.

He readily confesses that he tried to pull out of A Real Pain when its shooting dates were changed, since the revised schedule meant his family would be able to visit only at the beginning of the Poland-set production, 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 is fortunate that Culkin was convinced to stay since it is hard to imagine A Real Pain, which opens in Singapore cinemas on Feb 20, without him.

Culkin and American co-star Jesse Eisenberg – who 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 is 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.

Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.

What did you make of A Real Pain when the script first came to you?

I was laughing really hard out loud, which hardly happens. It was such a tight, wonderful script that I did not 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 would not say the dialogue out loud until we were shooting.

Your primary scene partner is Jesse Eisenberg, who is also the writer-director. How does that affect your dynamic?

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 is a huge faux pas, you get smacked in the mouth for that and every time he did it, it threw me. My chest would pop out, and I would 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 realised he was actually really good at it. He would know what the exact little solve was for the scene if it was not working.

He is also really fun to play with. I have heard some people approach the acting thing as being almost like a fight: We go to our corners and then we come out and we duke it out in the scene. I have a totally different philosophy.

You have not been on a set since A Real Pain wrapped. There are other actors who go nuts if they are not constantly rolling into the next project.

That, to me, is very weird. I have also been told that there are people that get really bummed if their movie does not do well. I don’t understand that. That is 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 is weird.

More than most actors I talk to, you seem to prioritise your life over work.

Yeah, for example, I was in Warsaw and I asked for one fewer 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 is why with this movie, I was like: “Why did I say yes to this? There is 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 whether I do it or not.

Do you consider yourself ambitious?

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 have ever known, and she said yes to a date with me. Now I am 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.

(The accolades are) nice, but the real stuff is me being home with my kids, when I am reading them books and singing them songs until they go to sleep. That is the whole point of life. The rest of it, I am doing so I can get back to that. NYTIMES