Kieran Culkin Will Join ‘Little Gold Men’ Live at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival

Kieran Culkin is getting back on the awards trail. The decorated New York native, currently in the running for his first Oscar nomination for his performance in A Real Pain, will be honored later this month at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival with the Virtuoso Award, following in the footsteps of Oscar winners including Eddie Redmayne and Jennifer Hudson. A Real Pain will screen as part of the award’s presentation. Culkin will also take part in a special live recording of Vanity Fair’s Little Gold Men podcast—hosted by Rebecca Ford, Richard Lawson, and yours truly—on Monday, October 28. The episode will then air in November. You can hear more about the event—as well as more live Little Gold Men announcements, with the podcast set to make a few more stops around the country this fall—by listening to this week’s episode (coming soon).

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Set for release on November 1 via Searchlight Pictures, A Real Pain earned raves out of its world premiere at Sundance in January before gaining momentum as an official selection of the Telluride and New York film festivals this fall. Oscar nominee Jesse Eisenberg wrote, directed, and costars with Culkin in the bittersweet story of estranged cousins who take a trip to Poland together to honor their late, beloved grandmother—and work out their complex relationship in the process. Culkin’s wiry, heartbreaking performance as the adrift Benji stirred early Oscar buzz for the actor, who’s only appeared in two feature films over the past seven years.

“[Benji]’s not at all self-aware, but he is self-aware in certain areas, and he has these total missing spots that I find to be really funny. And it’s tragic,” Culkin told me before the film’s premiere. “It’s sad that somebody can be this old, this far along in their life, and just really not know themselves, know how rude they’re being, know their negative qualities.”

Culkin recently wrapped his four-season run on Succession, for which he won best-actor Emmy and Golden Globe awards earlier this year. On film, he’s known for cult hits like Igby Goes Down and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and after making his Broadway debut a decade ago in Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth, he’s set to return to the Great White Way next year in a major revival of Glengarry Glen Ross, starring opposite Bob Odenkirk and Bill Burr.

A significant stop on the fall-festival circuit, this year’s SCAD Savannah Film Festival will find several other major awards-season players attending the Georgia event, including Sing Sing’s Colman Domingo, Emilia Pérez’s Zoe Saldaña and Karla Sofia Gascón, Nightbitch’s Amy Adams, A Different Man’s Sebastian Stan, and more. The festival runs from October 26 to November 2.