Kieran Culkin is enjoying a successful career in acting as an adult, but first he had to navigate the wild waters of being a child star in a famous family.
Unlike older brother Macaulay, Kieran found that his own experience as a child star wasn't as chaotic or traumatic. Where their professional experiences varied, so too did their relationships with their father, Kit Culkin.
Macaulay has opened up about being physically and emotionally abused by his parents as a child.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Kieran recalls growing up the middle child of seven children. His mother, Patricia, worked nights and kept her kids, each two years apart, safe and fed. Kieran was 6 when he began auditioning with his older siblings.
At 15 years old, Macaulay emancipated himself from his parents amid their divorce. He's been open about claims of abuse against his dad.
"My father was jealous of me. He was a bad man," Macaulay told Marc Maron his WTF podcast in 2018.
"He was abusive. Everything he tried to do in life, I excelled at before I was 10 years old."
Kieran maintains he was never abused. "But," he noted.
"He wasn't a good person and, yeah, probably not a good parent."
Kieran shared that all seven of the Culkin kids had a more consistent relationship with Patricia than with Kit.
"I never looked at him as Dad," Kieran says.
"He didn't really belong here, and when he was finally gone for good, it made the most sense."
Elsewhere in the interview, Kieran discusses how his late sister, Dakota, and her unique sense of humor are what he draws from when playing Roman Roy on Succession. Dakota was 29 years old when she was hit by a car while crossing the street and killed.
"That's the worst thing that's ever happened, and there's no sugarcoating that one," Kieran said.
"Each one of us handled it very differently. I think everyone was just torn up inside," he continued.
"What has it been, 13 years now? Holy [expletive]. That's crazy. Jesus [expletive] Christ. I accepted at the time that this is going to be forever, and it's never going to be fine."
"It's always going to be devastating. I still weep about it out of nowhere," Kieran said.
"Something funny she did will pop in the head and make me laugh, and then I'm weeping. Sometimes it's knowing that she's not going to meet my kids and they don't get to have her, and it's hard to describe what she was like."
Succession is a more popular project than Kieran had anticipated being involved in, but he's settled into his role.
"I'm trying to remember the exact moment it hit me," he said.
"I think it was at the end of the first season. I remember coming home and thinking, 'This is what I want to do with my life. I think I want to be an actor.' I was, like, 36. I'd already been doing it for 30 years."
