It isn’t any of Kieran Culkin’s business if his movies do well

Kieran Culkin is an incredibly talented, Emmy-award-winning actor, but he’s also, in the best possible way, a poster child for doing 100% at his day job and not an ounce more. Does he care if his movies do well? “Of course not, that’s not my business,” he told The New York Times in a recent interview. “If I were the producer, maybe I would care, but my business was to show up on set and do the job. What the response is has nothing to do with me, so I think it’s weird.” Does he consider himself ambitious? “No,” responded. Maybe in his personal life—he jokingly cited the fact that his now-wife, Jazz Charton, actually agreed to go on a date with him even though she was “the most beautiful and charismatic person [he’d] ever known” as an ambitious episode—but “for work, no.”

This attitude doesn’t come from a lack of concern over the quality or impact of his work as much as a fear of the type of all-consuming, life-altering fame that stars like Daniel Craig and Chappell Roan have gotten candid about in recent months. “I don’t personally know anybody that has hit a level of fame that likes it,” he said, which, anecdotally, really does seem to be true. “I have a friend who became famous overnight and his horror story was realizing, ‘Oh, it’s too late. I [expletive] [sic] my life’… I remember when he told me that story years ago, I was like, ‘Oh man, I hope that never happens to me.’”

Of course, Kieran Culkin hasn’t been anonymous since at least the first episode of Succession, if not before. (He does have an instantly recognizable brother, after all.) Still, he hasn’t hit a level of notoriety that would keep him away from his family in any fundamental way, despite the fact that his A Real Pain press tour did force him to miss a parent-teacher conference he would have otherwise loved to attend. (“I think I’m getting to the place of having to accept that I can’t always get home,” he said.)

Regarding awards and accolades, he continued, “That stuff is nice, but the real stuff is me being home with my kids, when I’m reading them books and singing them songs until they go to sleep. That’s the whole point of life. The rest of it I’m doing so I can get back to that.”