Kieran Culkin’s 2025 trophy run has officially begun

This may not be his first successful Golden Globes rodeo, having previously nabbed honors at the behest of Succession, but this win for Kieran Culkin is no less special.

Indeed, the actor has long been earmarked as the favorite for Best Supporting Actor honors after his turn in A Real Pain, and he’s finally started to collect. The Scott Pilgrim vs. the World alum had plenty in the way of competition, with the likes of Denzel Washington (Gladiator II), Edward Norton (A Complete Unknown), Guy Pearce (The Brutalist), Jeremy Strong (The Apprentice), and Yura Borisov (Anora) also having been nominated.

All fantastic performances from consummate artists, but there’s a reason that Culkin was so loudly declared as the frontrunner.

In A Real Pain, Culkin was tasked with stepping into the shoes of one Benji Kaplan, the socially explosive cousin to the more reserved and anxious David, played by the film’s writer and director Jesse Eisenberg. Together, they venture to Poland for a Jewish heritage tour in honor of their late grandmother, during which they clash, reminisce, embarrass each other, and cherish each other with twice the fervor.

The magic of Benji as a character is his emotional relentlessness; whether he’s effortlessly charming the rest of the tour group, spearheading spontaneous photo-ops, taking issue with their leader’s approach to the tour, or lacerating a culturally insensitive faux-pas, his mortal essence is dialed up to 11 and he occupies more than his fair share of space with it.

In other words, Benji is clearly an obtusely demanding character on a purely emotional front; certainly amongst the characters played by his fellow nominees. And this is all before the proceedings of Eisenberg’s script are factored into the equation.

The proceedings in question involve a dissection of the question, politics, and habitation of pain. Benji is contending with immense grief over the loss of his grandmother, all while the Kaplan family’s generational trauma and the social mores of being perceived as a burden swirl around the ethos of their journey.

All this, and Culkin still manages to nail every single dramatic and comedic beat with the exact strain of sincere smarm that we so often expect from the actor, but this time with an underpinning of devastating anguish that made many an audience member chuckle while holding out on a near-simultaneous sob.

Indeed, it’s absolutely, positively monumental acting in a small-but-equally-monumental film that could very well have one of the bigger moments this awards season. And without a doubt, it’s Culkin who will lead the bulk of those victories, of which the Golden Globe is almost certainly just the first of many.