Yahoo News Kieran Culkin Says He Didn’t Realize He Wanted to Be an Actor Until Halfway Through ‘Succession’ Season 1
While Kieran Culkin may be an Emmy-winning actor now, he didn’t realize that was a career he wanted to pursue until halfway through Succession season one.
The actor sat down with Jesse Eisenberg at a Tribeca Festival conversation, where they discussed their decades-long careers in the entertainment industry, their upcoming film A Real Pain and more.
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When asked if he considered doing something besides acting, Culkin shared that he just talked about this with his longtime manager, Emily Gerson Saines, who told him that acting was kind of thrust on him because he has been doing it since he was 6.
“Suddenly, around the age of 20, I had a phone call with Emily, and she said, ‘Something, something, something, your career,'” he recalled. “I remember having a panic and going, ‘I have a fucking career?’ I was just a 6-year-old, and I was doing this, and I never once chose to do this for myself. So I had that sort of crisis at like 19, 20, which I think is sort of normal.”
He continued, explaining that after he realized that he had never chosen acting, he didn’t work for some time and tried to figure out what he wanted. While on the set of 2017’s Infinity Baby, he remembered feeling comfortable and settling into acting being something he would do for a living, because at least he knew how to do it.
“It wasn’t until about halfway through the first season of Succession, where I came home and I was having a talk with my wife, and I was like, ‘I think I know I want to do for a living. I want to be an actor.’ I had been doing it for about 31 years at that point. I spent a good couple of decades trying to figure out what else to do and then landed on the thing I was doing.”
Elsewhere in the conversation, Culkin explained that the hit HBO series changed his perspective on acting. When he started working on the show, he felt like he had a way of doing things that worked for him, like being completely off-book on some scenes and knowing the entire storyline inside and out. But that didn’t last very long.
“The show came out, and they were like, ‘OK, we don’t have the next episode. You’re probably not going to get the update before we shoot it. And also, by the way, we’re going to change that scene that we’re shooting in the morning,'” he explained. “I was forced to completely change that, and there was panic for a little while, and then finally, ‘Fuck it. I don’t know anything, and we’re just gonna do it completely differently this time.'”
Culkin admitted he found a “weird freedom” in doing something unknown. It forced him to trust people, and with Succession, that happened to work out pretty well, considering he won his first Emmy for his portrayal of Roman Roy in its final season.
“That was its own sort of new experience, and that taught me, I was like, ‘Oh, OK. I actually don’t need to know. Why don’t I just know as much as my character would know in this moment?'” he said. “It sounds pretty simple, but it goes against decades of the way I’d been working.”
Eisenberg and Culkin star alongside one another in A Real Pain, written and directed by the Fleishman Is in Trouble actor. According to the film’s description, they portray mismatched cousins David and Benji, who reunite for a tour through Poland to honor their grandmother. When their old tensions resurface, against the backdrop of their family history, the adventure takes a turn.
“Kieran has this unusual quality where he does things quite differently than I intended but better, and I’ve never really experienced that,” Eisenberg said. “I’ve experienced amazing actors, but it’s usually in line with what I was thinking.”
A Real Pain hits theaters Oct. 18.
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