The Kids Stay in the Picture

By Benjamin Nugent

No matter how well they pout and grin, there's one thing all child actors have to be able to do: relax. If you place an ordinary kid opposite Mel Gibson or Susan Sarandon and yell "action," he'll get as stiff and shaky as a screen door in a gale. Rory and Kieran Culkin, younger brothers of Home Alone star Macaulay, don't know from stiff. In this month's Igby Goes Down, in which they play the same prep-school rebel at different points in his life, they seem as at ease on camera as most people are on their couch.

Rory, 13, who plays Gibson's son in the sci-fi blockbuster Signs, sits down for lunch at a fancy Manhattan restaurant and promptly chugs a can of Red Bull energy drink. He then asks his mother to leave, sticks the lemon wedge from her Coke in his mouth and assumes an amiable but bored expression. Interviews, he makes clear, are not scary. Not much seems to intimidate Rory, including his brothers' careers. He says it's a nonissue that they're in the same business: "We don't talk about it. We talk like any other brothers would."

Kieran, 19, is even less daunted. Over Cokes at the same restaurant, different day, he doesn't come off as egotistical or spoiled, just brash. Burr Steers, who directed Igby, in which Kieran stars with Sarandon, likes to recount how he bagged the part: "Kieran comes skipping in and takes one look at me and says, 'You look like s___.' That was it. I knew he was the kid." The incident wasn't a big deal to Kieran, who shares Rory's pale skin and heavy-lidded eyes, which are useful for expressing boredom. "He had rings under his eyes, so yeah, I guess I told him he looked like s___," Kieran says. He shrugs. Business as usual.

Kieran and Rory are unusual actors in that they learned their trade not through training but through exposure on the sets of Macaulay's movies. "I wasn't trying to learn from them. I just kind of knew what to do from them," says Rory. "I grew up on a set, basically." Kieran, who was old enough to play a small part in 1990's Home Alone, went through the same immersion. According to Steers, that experience produced a distinctive style. "They don't realize how technically skilled they are. You don't see the acting, the seams in their work," he says. That's why they're so good. In their films, they look like real kids shuffling through normal ups and downs: when Kieran, as Igby, gets the news that his inheritance will be small, or when Rory informs Gibson he had to kill the family dog, it's easy to forget you're watching drama and not something like real life.

Kieran's childhood had plenty of real drama. The Culkins' father Kit is a former actor who had a reputation in the movie industry for taking an unusually aggressive interest in his children's careers. Of the seven Culkin children, only Rory, Kieran and Macaulay, all raised in New York City, are thespians today. But Kieran says he felt intense pressure from Kit to act, and to act the way Kit wanted.

"He'd always say, 'Don't listen to the director; listen to me,'" recalls Kieran. "There were a couple times he'd say, 'I can shut those cameras down. I can pull my son off the set.'" Macaulay has said Kit's stage fathering helped make acting an agonizing experience for him. After trying to lead a relatively normal life in the late '90s, he only recently returned to theater and film. Kit and the Culkins' mother Patricia Brentrup separated in the mid-'90s, and Rory lives with her. He won't say much about his dad or his parents' breakup. Kieran says he hasn't seen Kit in five years; if he hadn't loved the last role he played under his father's auspices, a handicapped kid in The Mighty, he would have quit the business for good. "Right after that movie, my father was out of the picture, and I had the ability to stop, but I had an urge to try to be better," says Kieran. "I'm trying to make it easier for Rory; he didn't have my father there to make it an unpleasant experience. He seems to actually be enjoying it."

And Rory, who plays Michael Douglas' son in an eccentric New York family in the upcoming A Few Good Years, does seem to be enjoying his version of the Culkin childhood. When asked if he prefers being on set to being in school, he rolls his eyes at what he regards as an idiotic question: "Ye-ah." Macaulay took time off from show biz because he wanted a more ordinary life. Rory doesn't.