Kieran Culkin on his favourite scene from ‘Succession’: “They were right and I was wrong”
Succession is, without a doubt, a once-in-a-generational masterpiece that forever rocked the landscape of television. The story of the Roy siblings and their fight for power has been described as almost Shakespearean in its complexity and drama, with the creator Jesse Armstrong loosely basing the tale on the Murdoch family and their media conglomerate.
From the very first episode, in which the head of the family, Logan Roy, has a health crisis, we are immediately met with the stakes of the story and thrust into the high life of the top 1%, with the siblings living in New York penthouse apartments and flying everywhere in their private helicopters.
Many people have struggled to peg the show into one box, especially considering that it often walks the tightrope between tragedy and comedy, with Kieran Culkin describing his favourite scene, which happens to be a perfect blend of the two.
The third season of the show takes a darker turn after Kendall Roy loses his desire to live, and the siblings continue their battle over who should take over as head of the company. However, there is one episode in which his crisis becomes particularly apparent, with the ‘eldest boy’ hosting a huge 40th birthday party that ends up sparking a massive existential crisis.
However, there is one sibling who ends up coming out on top, with Roman Roy securing a vague deal with Lukas Mattson, a tech mogul who has created an app that his father desperately wants to buy. After making the deal, he brags to his sister Shiv about his business success, with Culkin describing it as his favourite scene from the entire show.
When discussing this, the actor relayed, “In ‘Too Much Birthday’, there’s the scene after Roman’s basically got Madsen to agree to go see Dad, feeling like, on top of the world. I think it even ends with him walking down the street telling the driver to fuck off, you know, I’m going to walk home and call Dad and tell him, ‘you don’t need the others, I’m the only one’…”. It’s one of those rare moments when Roman feels like he can finally be taken seriously, having one-upped his siblings in a fruitful endeavour that would get the patriarch Roy to notice him and his business chops.
Culkin continued about the process of translating the emotions behind the scene onto the screen, and how Roman’s palpable excitement needed to be brought down a notch for the balance between the sibling banter to be restored. He said, “And then on the day, while we were doing the scene, I felt like I was invincible and like nothing could get me, so that’s how I approached this scene. And [Sarah] Snook was getting a little frustrated as she was like, ‘I can’t seem to penetrate you, and I’m throwing these insults at you’. And I was sort of like, ‘yeah, that’s how it is…’ Then all three [Snook, Lorene Scafaria and Jesse Armstrong] of them come up to me and are like, ‘Let’s see what happens if some of those jabs actually hit’, and I found one that did.”
During the scene, Shiv [Snook] makes another dig at Roman’s sexual problems, something that becomes a rather touchy subject for his character throughout the show. Culkin expanded on why, as he paid attention to what she was saying, the jab landed a punch, noting how it layered the scene, “because then my insults came from a different place… It made it more alive, and they were right, and I was wrong. And that was a lot of fun because you’re figuring it out in real time.”
