Kieran Culkin

The Succession star is feeling introspective as the HBO series that reignited his career comes to a close. On a long ferry ride, and over several rounds of ...

At the wrap party, there was karaoke, and Snook and Culkin sang an inspired rendition of the B-52s’ “Love Shack.” Mylod says he sounded like a deranged version of frontman Fred Schneider. A small group of cast and crew went on a final weeklong trip to film the last scenes of the final episode of Succession. “Here’s to you, and here’s to me / The best of friends we’ll always be / But if someday we disagree / Fuck off.” “He was more like, ‘Well, good, we’ve done it.’ But I bet if you said, ‘Would you like a fifth?’ he’d want to.” Of course, that would’ve depended on where the plot of season 4 takes the Roys. What Snook did next, she tells me, “is probably indicative of the very sibling relationship that Kieran and I have offscreen as well.” It’s something she imagines Culkin would’ve done to her had the roles been reversed: She rubbed it in his face. I like to say them, and then I like to go home.’ ” But between then and the shoot for the second episode, something clicked for Culkin, Ruck says. “Not because she was kindhearted but because she was shy.” A word or phrase they associate with Cody is all it takes for the Culkins to crack up. To this day, Culkin refuses to talk to Access Hollywood, because, he says, “they did a whole piece on my family in 1997.” Ditto with the New York Post, the outlet that taught him “the newspaper doesn’t always give you the facts.” He pauses. “That’s cool,” he said, “but that’s not me.” It was his younger brother Rory. But then they had one kid followed by another, and one day he woke up and felt like his family was living in the apartment of a “nineteen-year-old who doesn’t know how to do the dishes himself yet.” So they left. “He was little and having to try to accept that level of fame as reality.” At home, things remained relatively normal. “Watching you people melt down is the most deeply satisfying activity on planet earth,” a daughter of another dynastic family says to one of the Roys in the show’s second season.