The insult that launched Kieran Culkin’s career: “I wasn’t trying to be an asshole”
Before he landed his zeitgeist-capturing role as snarky, pampered Roman Roy in a reluctant battle with his siblings for their patriarch’s crown, Kieran Culkin was the manic pixie dream guy whose onscreen presence spoke of someone who didn’t take acting too seriously, and this helped him steal countless scenes in movies and shows like Scott Pilgrim vs the World and Fargo.
However, it would take the one-two punch of Succession and his heartbreakingly hilarious outburst in A Real Pain to finally vault him into winning the Oscars ‘Best Supporting Actor’ category. In many ways, it felt like the culmination of a three-decade journey for Culkin, who has admittedly often held his acting career at arm’s length.
Having said that, perhaps this unusual perception is to be expected when you are born in a showbiz family with a brother who was once the biggest child star in the industry, so he grew up struggling to fully embrace the career as something he wanted to actually do with his life. He ran a mile in the opposite direction when he experienced his first taste of adult fame as the sardonic, disaffected teen Jason ‘Igby’ Slocumb Jr in Burr Steers’ wry comedy-drama Igby Goes Down.
Igby is the son of an overbearing mother from old money, and he desperately tries to escape his privileged family ties by running away from prep school to live in Manhattan’s bohemian society. Culkin sent in an audition tape for the movie, but Steers rejected it, before circling back to him after failing to find anyone else suitable for the part.
The two men met at a diner to discuss the film and, once again, Steers was convinced Culkin wasn’t the guy, until he said something that changed everything, and inadvertently launched his career as the adult potty-mouthed actor. “You look like shit,” Culkin told Steers, likely annoyed at being told yet again that the director didn’t think he was the man to play Igby.
The stunned filmmaker admitted he suddenly had an incredible urge to smack the rude young star upside the head, but then it hit him: this insult was exactly why Culkin was perfect for Igby. This was a character, after all, who regularly pissed off everyone around him by saying what other people would never dare to utter.
“How many people fucking hit Igby in that movie?” Culkin laughed, “He gets hit by five or six characters!”
Overall, the actor claimed he “wasn’t trying to be an asshole” to Steers, and he certainly wasn’t playing 3D chess by acting like Igby in real life to get the role. Instead, he admitted, “I just didn’t have much of a filter then”. Whatever the case, it landed him the part, and he later said Igby Goes Down’s five-week shoot was more useful than “all of the acting classes I could have taken”.
In fact, he is adamant that, without Steers, he wouldn’t be where he is now (“I feel I owe him my career”), even though it still took him another decade to fully accept it was his calling.
“Suddenly, at the age of 20, I found myself with a career,” Culkin told Backstage of that post-Igby Goes Down period. “That was terrifying, because I never once decided I wanted to do this, and suddenly I’m like, ‘I have a career now?’”
Over the next six years, Culkin studiously avoided screen roles entirely, placing all his focus on theatre, until he finally felt comfortable enough to return with 2008’s Lymelife.
Finally, it seemed as if all his experience, coupled with the transformative Igby Goes Down shoot, aligned with how he felt about his ‘career’, a word that had previously scared him so much. “I was on a set and I felt comfortable, and I remember thinking, I can do this,” he noted with a wry grin, “It took until I was 33 to be like, ‘Oh, I think I know what I want to do. It’s what I’ve been doing’.”
