Kieran Culkin Comes Clear About How Little Religion He Had In ‘Succession’ Succeeding

Image via HBO

In a recent actors’ roundtable, Kieran Culkin admits that although his show is called Succession, he didn’t exactly see a path to success for it in the early days. The event, hosted by The Hollywood Reporter, featured Culkin, Jeff Bridges (The Old Man), Damson Idris (Snowfall), Michael Imperioli (The White Lotus), Pedro Pascal (The Last of Us), and Evan Peters (Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story).

Culkin explained that Succession is his first TV series and that as a film actor, he was used to not worrying about whether something was embraced by the public. He said, “It’s just a movie. To me, it’s finished. It’s none of my business,” adding, “If it’s, like, good or bad, or how well it does, it’s done now. … I’m doing the next thing.”

However, with Succession, Culkin said he suddenly had “an invested interest.” According to the actor, when he began shooting Succession, he could tell the material was good. But he also thought to himself, “Who the hell is going to want to watch this show?” And indeed, Cuklin noted, audiences were “a little bit slow” to embrace the series at the beginning but gradually began to connect with it.

The measured growth in the Succession fandom is likely due to how despicable most of Succession‘s characters are. It really does take a few episodes to find the humanity in money-grubbing uber-capitalists who see people as numbers instead of individuals. If that’s not intense enough, Culkin’s character, Roman Roy, is equal parts stunted man baby, verbose pervert, and blasé neo-Nazi. When you begin watching the series, you want to kick Roman down the stairs. It takes the better part of a season to realize that everything toxic about him comes from the one-percent bubble he occupies and the terrible relationships he has with his parents.

Of course, Roman is pretty intelligent, and he knows right from wrong — we still want to kick him down the stairs, but we also understand that he’s subconsciously begging for that punishment. Hence, he’s a well-rounded character rather than a boring caricature of the upper crust.

Over the course of four seasons, all of Succession‘s characters have benefitted from nuanced shading between their four-letter jousts. It’s no surprise that fans are now fervently anticipating the series finale this Sunday, May 29. And if Roman actually is kicked down some stairs, someone owes us royalties. We can be capitalists, too.

About the author

Matt Wayt

Matt lives in Hollywood and enjoys writing about art and the business that tries to kill it. He loves Tsukamoto and Roger Rabbit, and thinks snap zooms in CG shots are tacky.