48 Minutes With … Kieran Culkin

Playing dumpling roulette with television’s new favorite lovable bad boy.

- Adam Sternbergh

None.” This is Kieran Culkin’s one-word answer to my question about how much preparation he put into playing Roman Roy, the charismatically loathsome scion of the billionaire Roy clan and the breakout character on HBO’s Succession, the breakout show of the summer. We’re sitting in Decibel, the impressively graffitied East Village sake bar. It’s early enough that it’s empty save for a few tourists who’ve just arrived, guidebooks in hand. “Thirty-five and a half years on the island of Manhattan,” says Culkin about his lifetime in New York. “I can’t tell if there’s more people on the street or I’m just old so I’m getting more frustrated that there’s people on the street,” he says of East Village crowds. “I’m dating myself, but I used to Rollerblade down the sidewalk and it was fine. Now I have a hard time walking.”

Decibel is a good refuge from all that. “This place is authentic. It really is what it is. It’s not like some designer came in and said, ‘Let’s put a bunch of graffiti on the walls and stickers.’ ” As it happens, it’s also the bar where I had my first date with my now-wife. When I mention this to Culkin, he wants to know how long we’ve been married, then holds up a wedding ring, along with a single nail-polished fingernail. “Five years.” He’s married to Jazz Charton, a Foley artist, whom he met in a slightly Roman Roy kind of way: He approached her while she was out at a bar when the guy she was with went to the bathroom. He seems happy to have settled down. His Valentine’s Day tradition with his wife is to “eat doughnuts in bed and watch terrible movies” while drinking the occasional shot.