Kieran Culkin Admits He Didn't Realize His Passion for Acting Until Midway Through 'Succession' Season 1

While Kieran Culkin is now an Emmy-winning actor, he didn't realize he wanted to pursue this career until halfway through the first season of Succession.

During a conversation with Jesse Eisenberg at the Tribeca Festival, the two discussed their long careers in the entertainment industry, their upcoming film A Real Pain, and more.

When asked if he had considered a different career path, Culkin revealed that he recently discussed this with his longtime manager, Emily Gerson Saines. She reminded him that acting was somewhat thrust upon him since he started at the age of six.

"Out of the blue, around the age of 20, I had a conversation with Emily, and she said, 'Something, something, something, your career,'" he recounted. "I distinctly remember feeling a wave of panic and thinking, 'I have a career?' I was just a 6-year-old, going along with it, never consciously choosing this path for myself. So, I had that kind of crisis at around 19 or 20, which I think is pretty common."

He went on to describe how, after realizing that acting wasn't a conscious choice for him, he took a break from work to figure things out. It wasn't until he was on the set of 2017’s Infinity Baby that he started to feel comfortable and accepted acting as something he could do for a living, simply because he knew how to do it.

"It wasn’t until about halfway through the first season of Succession, where I came home and I was having a talk with my wife, and I was like, ‘I think I know what I want to do for a living. I want to be an actor.’ I had 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."

Culkin also shared how the hit HBO series changed his perspective on acting. Initially, he had his own methods that seemed to work well for him, such as being completely off-book for some scenes and having a thorough understanding of the entire storyline. However, that approach didn't last long.

"The show came out, and they were like, ‘OK, we don’t have the next episode. You’re probably not going to get the update before we shoot it. And also, by the way, we’re going to change that scene that we’re shooting in the morning,'" he explained. "I was forced to completely change that, and there was panic for a little while, and then finally, ‘Forget it. I don’t know anything, and we’re just gonna do it completely differently this time.'"

Culkin confessed that he found a "weird freedom" in embracing the unknown. It compelled him to trust others, and with Succession, that trust paid off, culminating in his first Emmy win for his portrayal of Roman Roy in the show's final season.

"That was its own sort of new experience, and that taught me, I was like, ‘Oh, OK. I actually don’t need to know. Why don’t I just know as much as my character would know at this moment?'" he said. "It sounds pretty simple, but it goes against decades of the way I’d been working."