The only role Kieran Culkin went out of his way to play: “It wasn’t at all like me”
Being a sibling is tough enough, what with your brother or sister constantly stealing your things, telling on you, and offloading their shenanigans on you.
But then, imagine that your annoying older brother becomes pretty much the most famous child actor on earth, gets insanely rich and starts hanging out with movie stars: how irritating would that be? Because that’s what happened to Kieran Culkin in the 1990s.
Macaulay Culkin had been acting since he was four and was cast in a film called Uncle Buck alongside John Candy, which then got him the lead role in Home Alone, which turned out to be one of the most famous and successful films in history. Kieran also got to be in the movie, which must have been a comfort to some degree, but for some time afterwards, there was presumably some scrapping at bedtime in the Culkin house.
While Macaulay went on to make more films, including My Girl, Home Alone 2, and Richie Rich, before running into well-publicised issues and retiring, the younger Culkin was fairly quiet for the rest of the decade. That was until he started to pop up in acclaimed films like Michael Caine’s The Cider House Rules and high school comedy She’s All That, before his role as a rebellious 17-year old alongside Susan Sarandon in 2002’s Igby Goes Down landed him a Critics’ Choice award, and he began to step out of the shadows of his famous brother.
That movie marked the transition for Culkin from child acting to more mature roles, and it was one that he pushed for relentlessly after auditioning and being rejected several times. Written and directed by Pulp Fiction actor Burr Steers, it tells the story of Culkin’s adolescent teen pushing back against the expectations of being from a wealthy family and dealing with dysfunctional parents, heading to New York to find a more interesting future.
With a star-studded cast including Bill Pullman, Jeff Goldblum and Clare Danes, it perhaps should have fared better at the box office than it did, but it did at least allow Kieran the chance to have his own younger brother, Rory, appear alongside him. The elder brother wanted the role of Igby so desperately that he refused to take no for an answer, and his sharp tongue found favour with the director.
He told Backstage: “I had only done kid acting, and Burr Steers really wanted me to do scene work and be an adult and be an actual actor who understands what the scene is and what’s happening and what you’re feeling. He wanted to work with me.”
He added how the role changed him as well, to the point where people thought he was like the character, noting, “There are friends of mine who’ve seen that movie and said, ‘That’s just like you’. And I say, ‘It wasn’t at all like me, but it influenced my life thereafter’. I loved the way Igby spoke, and I stole a lot of that.”
Although it has been more than 20 years since Culkin starred as Igby, it marked a new era for the actor, who then concentrated on theatre work for the next decade or so until he was back in the mainstream as Wallace Wells in Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs The World in 2010. After that, he made guest appearances on TV shows like Fargo before his real breakthrough as Roman Roy in the critically acclaimed smash hit Succession.
Already renowned as one of the finest shows in years, Keiran’s performance as a media executive scooped him multiple awards and ran for five tight years. So important was the show to him that he has since spoken about how it represented the first time he genuinely believed that he wanted to be an actor for a living after 30 years in the trade.
Last year, he solidified that success alongside Jesse Eisenberg in A Real Pain, the comedy drama about Jewish cousins touring Poland to honour their late grandmother, which earned him the Oscar for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ along with a slew of other honours.
It may have taken four decades, but now, when people mention a Culkin, there are two equally famous brothers to pick from.
