Oscars 2025: Kieran Culkin wins ‘Best Supporting Actor’
Kieran Culkin has won the Oscar for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ at the 97th Academy Awards for his performance in A Real Pain.
Culkin triumphed over fellow nominees Edward Norton, Yura Borisov, Guy Pearce, and Succession co-star Jeremy Strong. He has been a frontrunner for the award all season, securing ‘Best Supporting Actor’ wins at the Baftas, Screen Actors Guild Awards, and Golden Globes.
“Jesse Eisenberg: thank you for this movie, you’re a genius. I’ll never say this again, so soak it up,” Culkin said in his speech. The actor also thanked his mother and stepfather “for trying to raise me. You’re really good people, and you gave it your best shot.”
In what was a wonderfully personal acceptance speech, Culkin turned to his wife and their family plans for future children: “She said, ‘I will give you four if you win an Oscar’. That was about a year ago, and I haven’t brought it up until just now.”
This was Culkin’s first Oscar nomination. He also held the distinction of being one of only two nominees in the category this year who were nominated for a film that was not one of the ten ‘Best Picture’ nominees. The other was Jeremy Strong for The Apprentice.
In Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, Culkin plays Benji, who meets his cousin David (Eisenberg) for a Jewish heritage tour around Poland to connect with their family history and honour their late grandmother. Although they were once close, the cousins are now complete opposites, with Benji being an irreverent live-wire who enjoys living life by the seat of his pants and David being more uptight and self-conscious.
Although the film was not nominated for ‘Best Picture’, it did earn a nod for ‘Best Original Screenplay’ and was a critical favourite.
In Far Out’s review of the film, Emily Ruuskanen wrote: “A Real Pain masterfully blends both humour and darkness, striking a perfect balance in the grey area between both that reflects our reluctance to fully confront the darkness, either hiding behind a socially acceptable pain or ignoring the suffering that desperately demands our attention.”
Adding: “As we journey with this ragtag group of tourists through their odyssey of pain and guilt, we quietly begin to empathise with the pains we are afraid to speak out loud and those who need our care more urgently. But perhaps most importantly, Eisenberg finds a beautiful clarity through this conflict. While people are often the ones to inflict hurt, they are also the only antidote to our suffering, and it is only by exposing our wounds that we can make sense of this pain.”
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