Kieran Culkin felt like a “child” filming “Succession.”
The former child star admitted during Variety’s Actors on Actors with Claire Danes that playing Roman Roy in “Succession” opposite Brian Cox’s patriarch Logan Roy made him feel like he was seven years old again.
“I realize I’m doing it right now for some reason,” Culkin said. “Whenever I have to shoot with Brian, it’s like, ‘Dad, I feel like I’m seven.’ He can be a scary guy. Not to me — I can approach him as an adult. But for whatever reason, in character, I feel like I’m seven with him.”
Culkin added that filming the tense Roman-Logan relationship made the series more meta, especially shooting Episode 2.
“The way the second episode ends with Roman’s being invited in — it looks like Roman’s actually going to go with Dad and go against the siblings. But it’s sort of on the fence,” Culkin said. “The way that episode starts off, with Dad calling Roman and saying, ‘You need to fire Gerri,’ I feel like Roman feels like he’s having the worst day of his professional life, and maybe one of the worst days of his life. He has no idea how bad it’s going to get.”
Culkin revealed that “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong shared that Logan Roy would die early on in the fourth and final season, but still set up some possible threads for a fifth season if the show were to ever continue past the shocking series finale.
“He told me what happens with Logan, and I asked him to break down everything. And he explained the entire season to me. And then when he got to the end, I said, ‘Well, that seems like that’s the end of the show,’” Culkin recalled. “And he goes, ‘Yeah, it does, doesn’t it? Although…’ And then he just started talking about all these different ideas off the top of his head. And then he just pitched an amazing fifth season and then another and another.”
Culkin summed up, “He felt like the story was complete, and creatively that was it? He’s like, ‘I feel like it’s complete.’ I feel like he’s satisfied as a writer.”
Culkin’s co-star Cox took to Instagram to call “Succession” the “greatest work experience ever” across his decades-spanning career. “The harmony between crew and cast was truly amazing,” Cox wrote. “It was on its way to become a great series but the love and commitment from crew to cast and writers, made it memorable. I would like to thank all of us in the making and creating of this show from the very bottom of my heart.”
