Jesse Eisenberg’s body road-trip comedy-drama, A Real Pain, stars Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin as cousins with a fraught history. Culkin already won a Golden Globe and a BAFTA for the role, and last night he took home the Oscar. 

In usual Culkin fashion, his speech was irreverent and ended up censored due to repeated cursing. But it’s when he turned his attention to his Succession co-star Jeremy Strong that hearts began to melt. Evidently, despite rumors of a beef between them, the pair aren’t letting the bromance die.

Kieran Culkin shouts out his TV bro, Jeremy Strong

Strong was nominated for his role as Roy Cohn in The Apprentice, and Culkin shouted him out in true Kieran-fashion. “Jeremy, you’re amazing in The Apprentice,” he began. “I love your work,” he continued, before letting out a curse word. The next part of his speech was censored out, but an ITV live stream revealed that he had immediately expressed regret for his x-rated slip-up.

“I cursed, there we go! I didn’t mean to,” he said.”I’m not supposed to single anyone out, it’s favoritism, but you were great.” Culkin went on to thank his manager of 30 years, A Real Pain writer and director Jesse Eisenberg (who he called a genius), and his mother and stepfather.

He concluded the speech with a hilarious call-back to his Emmy acceptance speech from last year, where he announced that his wife, Jazz Charton, had agreed to have a third child with him if he won. This time, he revealed that she had agreed to a fourth child that night on the condition that he won an Oscar. He concluded the speech with a cheeky, “No pressure, but let’s get cracking on those kids,” and the crowd went wild.

Long live the Hollywood bromance!

JEREMY STRONG AND KIERAN CULKIN HUGGING!!!!!! ENDING ALL OF Y’ALL WHO CREATED THE MOST UNNECESSARY BEEF THIS ENTIRE AWARD SEASON BETWEEN THESE TWO!!!!! pic.twitter.com/maiUJf0qB5

— abbey (@sophscession) March 3, 2025

Culkin’s earnest mention of Strong during his acceptance speech went viral. Topping it off was when the pair hugged tightly on the red carpet. This immediately squashed the unfounded rumors that the actors had beef between them. The rumors began when Culkin made a ing comment about Strong during his Actors on Actors chat with Colman Domingo. 

Speaking on the art of storytelling, Culkin said, “I sort of object to when actors call themselves storytellers- sorry Jeremy,” referring to when Strong had called himself a storyteller during an actors roundtable. 

Strong seemed to strike back at Culkin in January in a conversation with Deadline. “Lately, people have felt the need to take shots at me or say disparaging things,” he said. “Which I don’t really think there’s any need for. I feel we’re storytellers.” People ate up the beef quickly, considering how compelling the narrative was: former co-stars with different ideologies about acting. However, Culkin put all the rumors to rest with his easygoing vibe. 

JEREMY STRONG BEING THE FIRST PERSON KIERAN CULKIN MENTIONS IN HIS SPEECH THAT’S LITERALLY FAMILY pic.twitter.com/luoTrPJCAg

— adrien (@evercornelias) March 3, 2025

From Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart, to Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, bromances in Hollywood are still alive and well.  Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are the modern prototype, with three decades of friendship under their belt. Another fan-favorite duo is Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan. The latter was another frequent name this season for his films, A Different Man and The Apprentice. Through it all, Mackie hasn’t hesitated to show love to his Marvel co-star. 

Locks have been few and far between this awards season. The Brutalist, Emilia Pérez, and Conclave have all vied for the frontrunner position at different points in time, Mikey Madison and Demi Moore have tangoed in the Best Actress pool over these last few months, and Timothée Chalamet’s SAG Award win the other night has shaken up the Best Actor race significantly.

But among the exciting ebb and flow, we’ve been able to count on one man for pure, unadulterated consistency, and that’s Kieran Culkin. He got the Golden Globe, he got the BAFTA, he got the SAG Award, he got the Critics’ Choice Award, and now — as the wolves foretold — A Real Pain has landed Culkin a Best ing Actor Oscar.

The award marks Culkin’s first-ever Academy Award nomination and now win. The Home Alone alumnus is no stranger to this part of showbiz, as he was famously one of the leading men in Jesse Armstrong’s Emmy juggernaut Succession, but the last time he was nominated by a major awards body for his work in a feature film was in 2003’s Igby Goes Down.

The latest Best ing Actor winner was up against Yura Borisov (Anora), Edward Norton (A Complete Unknown), Guy Pearce (The Brutalist), and Culkin’s former Succession co-star Jeremy Strong (The Apprentice).

Also representing A Real Pain at this Oscars ceremony is Jesse Eisenberg, who’s nominated for Best Writing (Original Screenplay). That script is up against Sean Baker’s Anora, Brady Corbet’s and Mona Fastvold’s The Brutalist, Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, and September 5‘s writing team of Moritz Binder, Tim Fehlbaum, and Alex David.

The film stars Eisenberg and Culkin as David and Benji Kaplan, two cousins who reunite on a heritage tour through Poland in honor of their late grandmother. The pair are quite the odd couple — David being painfully anxious, Benji being explosively charismatic — but their conflicting personalities are just one part of an equation consisting of family drama, a gutting tragedy, and the history of one of the most horrific evils staring them in the face. Together, the pair reckon with pain of all shapes, sizes, and relevancies, and in their pain, a much-needed cousinly love rears its head, too.

To call Culkin’s work as Benji “masterful” is equal parts redundant and understated — a sweeping of the major awards shows is one thing, but it’s quite another to watch Culkin bring his singular, lovably smarmy thunder to Benji in the film itself. It’s a manic performance full of the energy we’re used to seeing from the actor, but there’s a vulnerability that takes precedence here that subsequently splits off into sweetness and a devastating sorrow.

Indeed, it’s a gut punch of a turn that only Culkin could have crafted, and to see it honored in this way is sure to be one of the finest justices of the whole night, to say nothing of the always-guaranteed, delightfully unhinged speeches that Culkin has become famous for over this last little while.

This year’s cinematic accolades are due to be distributed amongst the most eclectic group of films in quite some time. Where the big ceremonies tend to favor serious dramas like the seeming frontrunner The Brutalist, there’s a wealth of genre creativity in the running as well, from The Substance, to Wicked, to Emilia Pérez.

Comedy is having a moment as well, with Jesse Eisenberg’s sophomore filmmaking effort A Real Pain having made leaps and bounds in the conversation as of late, with one Kieran Culkin having already picked up a Best ing Actor win at the 82nd Golden Globes; a win that’s bound to be just the first of many for the actor. For now, the buddy dramedy is enjoying the less-lucrative but equally-exciting honor of being the king of the Hulu castle.

Per FlixPatrol, A Real Pain continues to soar above the Hulu competition on both the film charts and the overall rankings, eclipsing such titles as Abbott Elementary, Hell’s Kitchen, and all five Twilight movies. Indeed, if you thought Edward’s eyes were the eyes of a killer, just wait until you see Culkin’s.

A Real Pain stars Eisenberg and Culkin as David and Benji Kaplan, two cousins who go on a heritage tour through Poland in honor of their late grandmother. During their trip, they navigate personal, interpersonal, and familial drama/trauma, bicker and reconcile, and come to with their pain against the backdrop of their Jewish ancestry.

A Real Pain‘s not-so-secret weapon is Benji, who imposes himself upon the world with an incomparable intensity. Whether that intensity takes the form of charming geniality or aggressive sensitivity depends on the moment you find him in. This contrasts with David, who’s much more reserved and anxious and wallflower-coded, often apologizing for the breakneck nature of his cousin.

In this way, Benji is the driving force of the film’s comedy. We know he’s always dialed up to much more extreme levels than anyone around him, but we never know which emotion — be it sarcasm, friendliness, or anger — he’s going to unleash from one minute to the next. This makes for a self-sufficient tension loop that allows his one-liners to land consistently (because we’re always waiting for him to do something), and this loop is given another element in the form of David, whose reactions to Benji’s behaviors are just as comedically and dramatically significant as Benji himself. In many ways, the audience lives vicariously through David.

The entirety of the film’s comedy, meanwhile, stands in balance with A Real Pain‘s emotional weight. In other words, this already well-constructed comedy framework is made even more potent by serving as the cheeky levity to the film’s gutting explorations of trauma, pain, envy, and mental health.

At just 90 minutes and sporting a rather simple narrative, A Real Pain seems like one of the humbler films populating the awards circuit this year. But beneath that unassuming front is one of the most intelligent screenplays to have come to life in the last few years, and coupled with Kieran Culkin’s domineeringly cutthroat performance, A Real Pain has more than earned its reputation as one of the foremost titans of this latest accolades race.

This may not be his first successful Golden Globes rodeo, having previously nabbed honors at the behest of Succession, but this win for Kieran Culkin is no less special.

Indeed, the actor has long been earmarked as the favorite for Best ing Actor honors after his turn in A Real Pain, and he’s finally started to collect. The Scott Pilgrim vs. the World alum had plenty in the way of competition, with the likes of Denzel Washington (Gladiator II), Edward Norton (A Complete Unknown), Guy Pearce (The Brutalist), Jeremy Strong (The Apprentice), and Yura Borisov (Anora) also having been nominated.

All fantastic performances from consummate artists, but there’s a reason that Culkin was so loudly declared as the frontrunner.

In A Real Pain, Culkin was tasked with stepping into the shoes of one Benji Kaplan, the socially explosive cousin to the more reserved and anxious David, played by the film’s writer and director Jesse Eisenberg. Together, they venture to Poland for a Jewish heritage tour in honor of their late grandmother, during which they clash, reminisce, embarrass each other, and cherish each other with twice the fervor.

The magic of Benji as a character is his emotional relentlessness; whether he’s effortlessly charming the rest of the tour group, spearheading spontaneous photo-ops, taking issue with their leader’s approach to the tour, or lacerating a culturally insensitive faux-pas, his mortal essence is dialed up to 11 and he occupies more than his fair share of space with it.

In other words, Benji is clearly an obtusely demanding character on a purely emotional front; certainly amongst the characters played by his fellow nominees. And this is all before the proceedings of Eisenberg’s script are factored into the equation.

The proceedings in question involve a dissection of the question, politics, and habitation of pain. Benji is contending with immense grief over the loss of his grandmother, all while the Kaplan family’s generational trauma and the social mores of being perceived as a burden swirl around the ethos of their journey.

All this, and Culkin still manages to nail every single dramatic and comedic beat with the exact strain of sincere smarm that we so often expect from the actor, but this time with an underpinning of devastating anguish that made many an audience member chuckle while holding out on a near-simultaneous sob.

Indeed, it’s absolutely, positively monumental acting in a small-but-equally-monumental film that could very well have one of the bigger moments this awards season. And without a doubt, it’s Culkin who will lead the bulk of those victories, of which the Golden Globe is almost certainly just the first of many.

Every ing day, fans gain a deeper appreciation for how perfectly cast Succession truly was. Whether it’s Brian Cox frequently channeling his inner Logan Roy by critiquing his on-screen son Jeremy Strong for his intense, Kendall Roy-coded approach to acting, or Kieran Culkin dealing with childhood trauma stemming from an abusive father by simply ignoring it… It’s clear that cast was born for those roles.

Culkin is now currently on the press tour for his latest film, A Real Pain, in which he stars alongside the equally talented Jesse Eisenberg. Directed by Eisenberg himself, the project could have served as the actor-director’s long-overdue mainstream comeback following the negative reception of Batman v Superman. Instead, Eisenberg has been using the spotlight to heap praise on Culkin’s unconventional performance and campaign for him to receive a ing Actor nomination at the Academy Awards.

A Real Pain delves into themes of family trauma, exploring Eisenberg’s real-life family’s experience with the Holocaust. The film follows two cousins as they return to their ancestral home to reconnect with their roots. It has received glowing reviews across numerous outlets, with our resident critic Charlotte Simmons notably describing it as “pure cinematic catharsis.” However, the film has also sparked curiosity about whether Culkin is drawn to roles centered on family trauma because of his own strained relationship with his father, Kit Culkin.

Kieran’s brother, Macaulay Culkin of Home Alone fame, has been candid about how his early success complicated their family dynamics. Macaulay has shared stories of their father’s petty mental torment, such as forcing him to sleep on the couch to assert dominance over the family. He has since expressed his determination to reinvent fatherhood for his own children with Brenda Song. Kieran, on the other hand, has taken a more dismissive approach to their father’s behavior. In a Hollywood Reporter profile, he remarked that the only things he re about Kit are that he never bathed and was not really a good person. Notably, Kieran has never accused his father of direct abuse.

In a recent interview with The Guardian, Kieran surprised readers with humorous anecdotes about his own childhood. Despite public assumptions that he would have only negative memories of growing up with a man described as “an abusive bully and drunk,” Culkin reflected on his past through a lighthearted lens.

The Emmy-winning actor shared how his own experiences as a child star help him empathize with his children as they navigate first-time experiences. Fully committed to fatherhood, Culkin has expressed a desire to be a full-time dad. His wife even celebrated him on Instagram this past Father’s Day with the caption, “Happy Father’s Day to this DADDY. Considering he didn’t grow up with a good example of what a dad is, he’s really quite good at it.”

When asked if family therapy helped him get to this place, Culkin laughed off the suggestion, saying he and his siblings are already “cooked.” He did, however, share a piece of wisdom from his godfather: “I will fully indulge anybody that wants to complain about their upbringing and childhood. I want to hear everything about that. And you can completely blame your parents for everything until you’re 30, and then figure shit out.”

Very wise. If only the Roy siblings could understand what their real-life counterparts seem to have figured out.

Perhaps the single most prevalent thesis orbiting the world today is that of sincerity, both in relation to the intimate value we place on it as individuals (however much we do or do not show that to others), and the tragedy with which it’s been disregarded. Every other day, it seems we’re stripping back layer after layer of irony — be it from one person or a wider sentiment/phenomenon — in hopes of getting to an honest place of love and connection.

But that thesis has always been and will always be a universal and relevant one; the innate humanism of it demands as such. This is to say that A Real Pain, the sophomore effort of writer-director Jesse Eisenberg currently playing in theaters, would be the stuff of pure magic in almost any cultural context, but is especially so in the times we’re living in now. Indeed, with a firm finger on the pulse of this quiet-yet-expansive story and a graphically revelatory Kieran Culkin as his co-star and muse, Eisenberg has almost certainly locked his ticket to the next awards circuit, where any nod for A Real Pain would significantly evolve the prestige of the corresponding honor.

A Real Pain stars Eisenberg as David, a straight-laced, anxious Jewish man who reunites with his lively, filterless cousin Benji as they venture to Poland for a heritage tour in honor of their deceased grandmother. As the days go on, tensions begin to rise and fall and rise again on of their shared family history, and specifically their own relationship.

The whole of Eisenberg’s filmmaking here shows a remarkable understanding of the power and necessity of duality. In David and Benji, you have two protagonists who could not be more different, but there’s also a duality within Benji just on his own that’s both celebratory and elegiac. He’s a carefree one-man party in one scene, and a judgmental pillar of reckless indignance the next. A vessel of great joy and perhaps greater pain, both for himself and his loved ones; such is the reward and price of being tapped into raw emotion, a state of being that Benji advocates for in his every word and action.

Of course, this steadfast balance of joy and pain is exemplified primarily in the context of the film’s genre; dramedy. This is a film that wants to make you laugh and cry, but you could say that about a lot of movies that are littered with lazy contrivances, and even seem annoyed by the fact that they need to include emotion in their stories.

None of those vices are present in A Real Pain. The comedic beats are never clamored for so much as let off the leash by Eisenberg’s and Culkin’s chemistry, while the strongest moments of pathos almost always slither in at the exact moment that you’ve let your guard down (or, at least, can’t get it back up in time). One of the film’s most important scenes (around the midpoint, during a meal), for instance, openly invites you to invest emotionally, but you don’t actually anticipate the proverbial trigger until it’s already been pulled. It’s a masterclass in tension from Eisenberg; one that filmmakers of tomorrow would be wise to study.

To the point of duality, there is a parallel universe out there where Kieran Culkin wasn’t cast as Benji, and that version of A Real Pain is countless steps below the one we got. As one of the most distinctively idiosyncratic actors of his generation, Culkin’s trademark, blunt-force snark loans itself to the rascally Benji immaculately, but the character’s planet-sized tenderness is channeled by a side of Culkin that we aren’t used to seeing; one that proudly bleeds with a love as pure as it is a survival tactic. It’s partly for this reason, perhaps, that Culkin’s performance is so impactful, and the intelligence of this casting cannot be overlooked, nor should Culkin be as the academies of the world gear up to name nominees.

The parallels in the film’s use of space and sound contribute heavily to A Real Pain‘s identity of duality as well. Lively and intimate piano scores decorate the film’s connective tissue, while an otherworldly silence punctuates the picture sparingly (the scene in which the cousins and their group tour the remains of a concentration camp is the foremost example). All the while, David and Benji are swept up in vast, towering Polish landscapes and landmarks, yet their immediate presence is rooted in each other and all the life-changing mundanity they come with.

At the core of A Real Pain‘s triumph, however, is Eisenberg’s storytelling, which thrives quite dizzyingly from both a written and visual perspective. The key word there is “perspective,” not only because such a thing evolves into a prevailing theme within the story, but also because A Real Pain serves up a smorgasbord of interpretations to sink one’s teeth into.

Without giving anything away, time seems to stop during the film’s midpoint when a certain detail is revealed and completely recontextualizes what came before that moment and what will come after that moment. Interestingly, you almost grieve the relative innocence with which you were watching A Real Pain up to this point, but within that grief is a narrative and emotional life that springs in directions you may have never thought possible. Pay attention to what’s going on with David beneath the surface, and consider how he might be trying to cope.

And yet, throughout, A Real Pain never once loses track of its values. Chiefly, those include the importance of headlong love, the longevity of past pain and loss, and how those things show up in the present (which themselves contribute to brand new, present pains; pay attention to how Eisenberg splits the frame into left and right sides, and watch how he fills those spaces so as to have a conversation about our time-specific proximity to pain and trauma).

And, at the end of it all is that exact, aforementioned thesis of sincerity. Indeed, all of these emotions that David and Benji give life to — whatever caused them, whatever they’re attributed to, and however they compare to similar emotions from “greater” or “lesser” sources — are real. Real joy, real pain, and a real damn fine reason to applaud Eisenberg, Culkin, and everyone involved on a job astoundingly done.