Kieran Culkin says he doesn’t care if his projects get badly reviewed as long as he enjoyed himself doing them.
The 42-year-old recently won best supporting actor in a motion picture at the Golden Globes for his performance in A Real Pain.
He tells Sky News he isn’t dependent on positive feedback, but it is “cool” when people find a connection to his work.
“I’m doing this [acting] around 36 years. I’ve been sort of trained or whatever, conditioned, to just not care what an audience response is to something,” he says.
“I’ve been in plays that I think ‘this is bad, but I’m enjoying it’. I don’t really care or if it gets poorly reviewed, I don’t really care. So I still sort of have that mentality but it’s actually quite nice that people are connecting with [A Real Pain]. To hear people that have seen it say, I know a guy like Benji or talk about him, it’s like that’s what this feeling is”.
The Succession actor stars alongside Jesse Eisenberg in the film about cousins who take a trip to Poland to see the country their grandmother left.
Culkin says taking notes from a co-star, who also wrote and directed the film, was a new and challenging experience.
“That’s tough; it just is,” he says.
“[Jesse] would give me a note, my chest would puff up and I would automatically get really defensive, like, I’m gonna hit this guy.”
‘The biggest taboo on a movie’
Eisenberg says playing the role and being the filmmaker made him “nervous” because he sees actors giving notes to be the “biggest taboo on a movie”.
“You don’t give an actor notes – never do that. You can commit arson on a movie set before you can give an actor notes,” he says.
A Real Pain is set in Poland and is inspired by a real-life trip Eisenberg took with his now wife Anna Strout more than 20 years ago to retrace his family’s roots.
“Had the war not happened, this is where I would be living,” he says – and so looking at Poland and its history became a huge inspiration to him.
The Now You See Me actor first wrote a play, The Revisionist, which debuted off-Broadway in 2013, and spent the decade redeveloping it to become the “buddy road trip” A Real Pain.
‘It’s this beautiful, warm, welcoming country’
The film weaves through the story of cousins reconnecting on their journey to visit, for the first time, their grandmother’s home before she was displaced during the Holocaust.
Eisenberg is currently in the process of gaining Polish citizenship and says his relationship with the country has changed over the years.
He says: “With Polish heritage, you grow up hearing that it was the site of the murder of all of your family and you hear that it’s bleak and especially if you’re a kid of the 80s and 90s like I am, you hear about bread lines from the Soviet era. And so going there was just unbelievably the polar opposite of what I had heard growing up.
“It’s this beautiful, warm, welcoming country and not only beautiful, warm and welcoming, but like what they did for me and allowed me to do, to tell my family’s story, to be able to shoot at a concentration camp, to be able to shoot on this very hallowed grounds of the various locations we were on was just amazing. I’m in such debt to them.”
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‘I grew up knowing performance was normal’
A Real Pain looks at how a person’s family history can shape who they become.
Eisenberg says growing up with a mother who worked as a birthday party clown helped him see acting as an attainable career.
He says: “Every morning I saw this woman get dressed up in a ridiculous outfit and put on crazy face makeup and tune her guitar to the piano. So, I grew up knowing that performance was normal.
“I didn’t grow up thinking that people who perform are weird and actors are weird and why do they? You know, I grew up thinking to behave in this silly way can be a professional job.
“So it just stayed in me. And now what we do is kind of ridiculous, but we take it seriously.”
A Real Pain is in cinemas now.
