Interview

The thing that’s striking about Kieran Culkin in person is his indistinctiveness: He’s smaller, more diffuse, and more everyguy than the sharp and damaged characters on which he’s made his name. In blue jeans and jacket he’s unrecognizable on an East Village street; in conversation he’s as funny and loquacious as a corner bartender. Turns out that’s by design, and probably therapeutic: As ascion of one of Hollywood’s largest and most controversial stage families, he started film acting at the age of 7, and ever since has endured tabloid noise about his father’s mismanagement of his older brother Macaulay’s runaway stardom from the Home Alone films—a pop-culture juggernaut that threatened to typecast the entire family by default.

But Kieran definitively overcame his surname’s baggage with 2002’s Igby Goes Down, where he held his own against Susan Sarandon as a morose upper-class teen bedeviled by his crazy family. He won widespread praise and a Golden Globe nomination. Then he disappeared, doing a play in London and hiding out in his downtown Manhattan apartment. Seven years later, he’s back, with Lymelife, a pointed and intense story of two disintegrating Long Island families in the late ’70s set against the first wave of national hysteria about Lyme disease. It co-stars Alec Baldwin, Cynthia Nixon, Timothy Hutton, and Jill Hennessy. Culkin plays Jimmy, older brother to Scott (played by Culkin’s real-life brother Rory) and a soldier facing deployment who finds himself wedged between his warring parents. Also on Culkin’s calendar is Margaret, a Kenneth Lonergan drama co-starring Anna Paquin.

Just as things were looking up professionally for the 26-year-old actor, tragedy struck: His older sister Dakota was killed in an auto accident at the end of last year. Culkin considered going back into seclusion but attended Sundance with his brother Rory, where Lymelife was greeted with rapturous reviews. He planned to spend Valentine’s Day with his mother and godfather. On that very afternoon, we sat down for lunch near his East Village apartment to talk about where he’s been and where he’s going.

MICHAEL MARTIN: What grabbed you about the script for Lymelife?

KIERAN CULKIN: It’s the basic questions that always throw me . . . I don’t know. I always try to look at it as a whole. When I read a script this good, do I want to be part of it? Also, I’d been part of it for seven years before we started shooting [He participated in an early reading of the movie at the Sundance Filmmakers Lab in 2001], and so had my brother Rory. He jokes that he’s been part of it for half his life. It was just a really well-written thing, and I was waiting for it to come together. I went to school with one of the writers, Steven Martini. He was seven grades above me.

MARTIN: Where did you go to school?

CULKIN: PCS . . . [sheepishly] Professional Children’s School.

MARTIN: Ah . . .

CULKIN: Ah! You’ve heard of it?

MARTIN: Yeah, every now and again—usually in proximity to huge fame.

CULKIN: Oh, yeah. Well, almost everyone who’s gone there says it in the same sheepish way that I did. I’m really embarrassed to say that.

MARTIN: What about Lymelife’s depiction of family was interesting to you?

CULKIN: It was sort of weird for me . . . I played the older brother, Jimmy, who seems to know more of what’s going on with the family, as opposed to the younger brother, who’s been shielded from it his entire life. That’s the point of the movie—it’s the younger brother’s coming of age. It’s realizing that his parents are just people. Jimmy has been aware of this for years.

MARTIN: Anything you could relate to personally? Your family has had its share of chaos.

CULKIN: There was not a really conscious connection. Rory and I had to look at each other like, “Did you experience this?” You always make a connection; you always have to draw from something. But I never had to say, “Oh, this reminds me of my family.” I think it’s something that people can all relate to—no family’s perfect.