An emotional Kieran Culkin thanked A Real Pain writer-director and co-star Jesse Eisenberg tonight as he accepted the Golden Globe for Best Male Actor In A Supporting Role for a Motion Picture.
“I’m here because Jesse Eisenberg wrote an incredible script. He’s a fantastic director and scene partner. So anybody that has an opportunity to work with him in any category, just leap at it. Thank you, sir,” Kulkin said.
“I love the Golden Globes. The first ever acknowledgement I got as an actor was a Golden Globe nomination when I was basically a kid, and so then that meant a lot. And so this has a special place now. It’s like the best date night that my wife and I ever have. So thanks,” said the actor who has segued from five seasons as irascible Roman Roy in Succession, which won him a Golden Globe last year, to another career defining turn as Benji, cousin to Jesse Eisenberg’s David, in a film that that follows the duo on a heritage tour of Poland. They are there to honor of their beloved and recently deceased grandmother, who was a Holocaust survivor with a party that includes a nerdy British history student, three Americans and a refugee from Rwanda who converted to Judaism after finding safe haven in Canada.
Eisenberg took the screenwriting award at Sundance where the film premiered and was the first big sale at the festival, to Searchlight Pictures. He plays the buttoned-up family man and Internet ad salesman to Kulkin’s uber charmer with a dark side who lives with his mother and smokes weed. The pair travel from the Grodzka Gate in Lublin to the Majdanek concentration camp where their grandmother was interred, to the house where she grew up. The men, who had been close as children but grown apart, attempt to reconnect.
Deadline’s review called Culkin’s Benji “a career high performance” in the kind of a role ‘that makes movie stars.”
This was Culkin’s sixth Golden Globe nomination and second win after his Succession Best Actor nod last year. He garnered four noms for the HBO series that ended last year. It was a competitive race that included Yura Borisov (Anora), Edward Norton (A Complete Unknown), Guy Pearce (The Brutalist), Culkin’s Succession co-star Jeremy Strong (The Apprentice) and Denzel Washington (Gladiator II).
The post Kieran Culkin Says “I’m Here Because Jesse Eisenberg Wrote An Incredible Script” As ‘A Real Pain’ Actor Accepts Golden Globe appeared first on Deadline.
