Kieran Culkin says shooting for Succession made him realize acting was his calling after being an actor 31 years

Kieran Culkin, the American actor recently opened up about the distinct moment he realized his true passion for acting, and that it came after 31 years of being in the industry.

On Thursday, June 13, the 41-year-old appeared at a Tribeca Film Festival panel with Jesse Eisenberg and shared how much he loved acting and realized it while working on HBO's Succession. Culkin said:

"It wasn't until about halfway through the first season of Succession where I came home and told my wife, 'I think I know what I want to do for a living, I think I want to be an actor.

He further added:

I'd been doing it for about 31 years at that point. I spent a good couple of decades trying to figure out what else to do and then landed on the thing I was doing."

Apart from his experience at the HBO series, Kieren also discussed other things that he learned in his decades-long career in entertainment.

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Kieran Culkin talks about ‘A Real Pain’, ‘Home Alone’ & ‘Succession’ at Tribeca Festival

Kieran Culkin began his career in 1990 as a child actor by playing cousin Fuller McCallister in Home Alone, alongside his brother Macaulay Culkin, who played the protagonist Kevin.

Kieran Culkin explained that in his more than three-decades-long career, his work in HBO's succession made him realize what he wanted to do with his life, ie acting. The actor spoke to his A Real Pain co-star Jesse Eisenberg about his role as Roman Roy in the series.

He shared on the Tribeca Film Festival panel that when he first began working on the Succession series, he was stuck in his way of doing things. Kieran Culkin always wanted to “be completely on book" until he decided to let go of the "panic". The actor added:

"I went, 'Fine, f**k it. I don't know anything, and we're just going to do it completely differently this time. And I found a weird freedom in doing something completely unknown that I hadn't done before and had been forced to trust people that it turns out were great. But that was, itself, that was its own sort of new experience."

The panelist also asked the star if he had ever considered doing something else besides acting. Kieran explained that he recently had a conversation with his longtime manager, Emily Gerson Saines, about the same. She had pointed out that he had been acting since he was 6 with Home Alone. Culkin added:

"Suddenly, around the age of 20, I had a phone call with Emily, and she said, ‘Something, something, something, your career, I remember having a panic and going, ‘I have a f**king career?’ I was just a 6-year-old, and I was doing this, and I never once chose to do this for myself. So I had that sort of crisis at like 19, 20, which I think is sort of normal."

Kieran Culkin's portrayal of Roman Roy in Succession earned him a Golden Globe Award and a Primetime Emmy Award for Best Actor in a Drama Series.

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He is starring alongside Jesse Eisenberg in the upcoming film A Real Pain, which is scheduled to be released in the United States on October 18, 2024.