Kieran Culkin says he doesn’t care if his projects get badly reviewed as long as he enjoyed himself doing them.
The 42-year-old recently won best supporting actor in a motion picture at the Golden Globes for his performance in A Real Pain.
He tells Sky News he isn’t dependent on positive feedback, but it is “cool” when people find a connection to his work.
“I’m doing this [acting] around 36 years. I’ve been sort of trained or whatever, conditioned, to just not care what an audience response is to something,” he says.
“I’ve been in plays that I think ‘this is bad, but I’m enjoying it’. I don’t really care or if it gets poorly reviewed, I don’t really care. So I still sort of have that mentality but it’s actually quite nice that people are connecting with [A Real Pain]. To hear people that have seen it say, I know a guy like Benji or talk about him, it’s like that’s what this feeling is”.
The Succession actor stars alongside Jesse Eisenberg in the film about cousins who take a trip to Poland to see the country their grandmother left.
Culkin says taking notes from a co-star, who also wrote and directed the film, was a new and challenging experience.
“That’s tough; it just is,” he says.
“[Jesse] would give me a note, my chest would puff up and I would automatically get really defensive, like, I’m gonna hit this guy.”
‘The biggest taboo on a movie’
Eisenberg says playing the role and being the filmmaker made him “nervous” because he sees actors giving notes to be the “biggest taboo on a movie”.
“You don’t give an actor notes – never do that. You can commit arson on a movie set before you can give an actor notes,” he says.
A Real Pain is set in Poland and is inspired by a real-life trip Eisenberg took with his now wife Anna Strout more than 20 years ago to retrace his family’s roots.
“Had the war not happened, this is where I would be living,” he says – and so looking at Poland and its history became a huge inspiration to him.
The Now You See Me actor first wrote a play, The Revisionist, which debuted off-Broadway in 2013, and spent the decade redeveloping it to become the “buddy road trip” A Real Pain.
‘It’s this beautiful, warm, welcoming country’
The film weaves through the story of cousins reconnecting on their journey to visit, for the first time, their grandmother’s home before she was displaced during the Holocaust.
Eisenberg is currently in the process of gaining Polish citizenship and says his relationship with the country has changed over the years.
He says: “With Polish heritage, you grow up hearing that it was the site of the murder of all of your family and you hear that it’s bleak and especially if you’re a kid of the 80s and 90s like I am, you hear about bread lines from the Soviet era. And so going there was just unbelievably the polar opposite of what I had heard growing up.
“It’s this beautiful, warm, welcoming country and not only beautiful, warm and welcoming, but like what they did for me and allowed me to do, to tell my family’s story, to be able to shoot at a concentration camp, to be able to shoot on this very hallowed grounds of the various locations we were on was just amazing. I’m in such debt to them.”
A Real Pain looks at how a person’s family history can shape who they become.
Eisenberg says growing up with a mother who worked as a birthday party clown helped him see acting as an attainable career.
He says: “Every morning I saw this woman get dressed up in a ridiculous outfit and put on crazy face makeup and tune her guitar to the piano. So, I grew up knowing that performance was normal.
“I didn’t grow up thinking that people who perform are weird and actors are weird and why do they? You know, I grew up thinking to behave in this silly way can be a professional job.
“So it just stayed in me. And now what we do is kind of ridiculous, but we take it seriously.”
Hollywood celebrities are among thousands of people to have been evacuated from their homes as fires rip through areas of Los Angeles.
Sky News’ US correspondent Martha Kelner reported that Tom Hanks, Ben Affleck and Reese Witherspoon were all evacuated on Tuesday as wildfires continued to spread in the Pacific Palisades suburb of LA.
The area, which is home to billionaires as well as Hollywood A-listers, is located between Santa Monica and Malibu.
Other celebrities who have fled their homes include the award-winning actor James Woods, who said last night he had been safely evacuated from his home in Pacific Palisades.
But he added in a post on X: “I do not know at this moment if our home is still standing.”
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Actor Mark Hamill, best known for playing Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars films, also posted on social media last night saying he evacuated his home in Malibu and his family were “fleeing for our lives”.
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This Is Us actress Mandy Moore was also forced to leave her home due to the fires.
She said in two Instagram stories she had fled the Eaton fire, which is raging near Altadena, with her children, cats and dog. They have found temporary refuge with friends.
The actress said: “Trying to shield the kids from the immense sadness and worry I feel.
“Praying for everyone in our beautiful city. So gutted for the destruction and loss. Don’t know if our place made it.”
According to Velvet Ropes, which maps celebrity properties, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, Matt Damon, Steven Spielberg, Hilary Swank and Sally Field all have homes close to where fires are raging.
Dr Dre, Adam Brody and Leighton Meester, Tyra Banks, Martin Short, Anna Faris, Milo Ventimiglia, Linda Cardellini, Mary McDonnell, Adam Sandler, Miles Teller, and Jennifer Love Hewitt are also said to have houses in affected areas.
In neighbouring Malibu, which was also affected by fires in December, stars including Beyonce and Jay-Z, Kim Kardashian, Lady Gaga and Billie Eilish are said to be among the celebrity residents.
The Palisades blaze has already burnt through more than 11,000 acres of land while the Eaton one has caused the death of two people, Los Angeles County fire chief Anthony Marrone said on Wednesday.
The two other fires are known as Woodley and Hurst, after the main areas affected.
All four blazes are still growing, Mr Marrone said.
A reality TV personality known for appearing on shows like The Hills and Made In Chelsea has told Sky News her family have lost their homes in the California wildfires.
Stephanie Pratt, a model and the sister of fellow reality TV celebrity Spencer Pratt, lives in the Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles, where more than 30,000 people have fled their homes due to the fast-moving blaze.
Los Angeles fire chief Anthony Marrone said on Wednesday that the Palisades fire is still growing and that “well over 5,000 acres” have been burnt.
At least two people have been killed so far, with around 1,000 buildings destroyed.
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House surrounded by flames during wildfire
California governor Gavin Newsom earlier declared a state of emergency over the four wildfires in the south of the state.
Speaking to Sky News from London, an emotional Ms Pratt said: “It’s just so crazy, I had no idea what was happening.
“I talked to my dad yesterday and he said ‘The Palisades is burning’. He said that he was at my brother’s house on Chautauqua [Boulevard] and they were just watching the flames come.
“The firefighters came and said you got to leave.”
‘I don’t know if my house is there’
Ms Pratt said her parents and brother Spencer, who like her starred in the reality series The Hills, were safely evacuated from the area.
However, the 38-year-old added that “all of the phones are disconnected” and that she doesn’t know what had happened to her home.
“I talked to my neighbour last night and she told me that [Palisades Charter High School] had burnt down, and that’s directly behind me, and so had Gelson’s Supermarket which is adjacent,” she said.
“I just can’t reach anyone to see if my house is okay. I just Googled it and it said that it’s destroyed and terrible… I don’t know if my house is there.”
When she asked her dad about Spencer, 41, who is married to 38-year-old Heidi Montag – another co-star of The Hills – Ms Pratt said he told her “I’ve never seen him like this”.
“I’m assuming he’s just completely catatonic,” she added. “We don’t care about the material things or anything like that, but this was their family home.
“This is where they raised their two little kids.”
The Palisades fire is one of five blazes currently burning in southern California– evacuation orders were in place on Tuesday in Altadena after another fire, called the Eaton fire, started near a nature preserve.
A third blaze, called the Hurst fire, also ripped through Sylmar in the north of the city.
And according to the state department Cal Fire, two more blazes – the Woodley fire in Los Angeles and Tyler fire in Riverside – broke out on Wednesday.
Two School Of Rock co-stars, who met at the age of 10, have got married.
Caitlin Hale and Angelo Massagli, who played Marta and Frankie respectively in the 2003 classic alongside Jack Black, tied the knot in New York on Saturday.
The couple brought some of the original cast of the film, which centres on a pretend substitute teacher turning a group of musically gifted school children into a rock band, together to celebrate their nuptials.
Posting on Instagram, Hale, 33, shared various images of the day, including a photobooth picture with a handful of their former cast mates.
The former actress, who now works as a sonographer, wrote under the post: “Special thank you to everyone who contributed to an unforgettable day!”
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Rivkah Reyes, who played bass player Katie in the film, also posted about the wedding, sharing a video on TikTok.
The clip, set to Stevie Nicks’s Edge Of Seventeen, included cameos from Brian Falduto, who played Billy, Joey Gaydos Jr, who played Zack, and Aleisha Allen, who played Alicia, among others.
The use of the song was a nod to one of the scenes from the film where Black and Joan Cusack, who plays headteacher Rosalie Mullins, sing the song in a bar.
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“Celebrating the marriage of Caitlin & Angelo with my forever fam #schoolofrock #wedding,” Reyes wrote alongside the video, which showed them all dancing together.
After appearing together in the film the only contact Hale and Massagli had was through a WhatsApp chat set up with the entire cast, according to The New York Times.
The pair then both left show business and coincidentally reconnected while studying in schools in Florida.
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Massagli, 32, who now works as a lawyer for TikTok, according to The Times, told the paper the familiarity they both had due to working together when they were younger “cut through some of those early relationship hurdles”.