Trust the Kieran Culkin Process

First, he nearly dropped out of Oscar hopeful A Real Pain. Then he convinced Jesse Eisenberg to change the way he directs.

- Rachel Handler

I’M waiting for Kieran Culkin at the tip of the Greenpoint ferry platform, where he’s suggested we meet on a Friday morning to get on the boat, take it a few stops to Dumbo, then walk across the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan—a sort of hung-over New Yorker’s triathlon. He’s late and sending me self-effacing riffs about it: “I was just about to text you to see if you were also running late or if you were the kind of person that was professional and an actual adult, unlike myself.” The ferry pulls into the dock at the exact moment that I spot him on the horizon. He is instantly recognizable, clad in all black and wearing a pair of sunglasses, eyebrows perma-arched, hair like an inverted comma, walking with distinct hustle but not running. The boat starts boarding right as he reaches me, a little out of breath and visibly relieved that he pulled it off. “This is what I do,” he says. “I pull up to airports, I don’t even know what airline I’m flying. Sometimes I don’t know what city I’m going to. I still get on the plane and everything’s fine.”

As we line up to show our tickets, Culkin, a lifelong New Yorker who rode the subway around the city alone by 13 and who contains all of the ungovernability and bullshitdetecting that this implies, digresses into a spontaneous but deeply felt spiel about the ferry’s flawed digital ticketing system (“The physical ticket, I can just put it in my pocket. I just have to get here early enough to go to the kiosk and fucking do it. But I’m lazy. And now I’m bitching about how lazy I am”). I will soon learn that this is his greatest talent, second only to his ability to wring humor, poignancy, and a sense of total reality from the dozens of onscreen characters he’s been playing since early childhood. Later, he will joyfully go full Larry David on everything from coffee-lid sizes to the concept of wearing shorts (“It’s a weird garment”).