Kieran Culkin Skips 2025 BAFTAS to be With ‘Quite Sick’ Family Member

Kieran Culkin was noticeably absent from the 2025 British Academy Film Awards.

Culkin, 42 — who was nominated for Supporting Actor for his role in A Real Pain — was not present at the Sunday, February 16, awards show to receive the accolade. Culkin’s A Real Pain costar Jesse Eisenberg accepted the award on his behalf. (Culkin beat out Anora’s Yura Borisov, Sing Sing’s Clarence Maclin, A Complete Unknown’s Edward Norton, The Brutalist’s Guy Pearce and The Apprentice’s Jeremy Strong.)

“I know I just won an award, but this is also like the fifth award I’ve accepted on Kieran’s behalf,” Eisenberg, 41, said at the ceremony held inside London’s Royal Festival Hall. “It confirms what I’ve always thought, we have a similar life, but his is about 27 percent better than mine.”

Eisenberg noted that Culkin “would love to be here,” and shared that he spoke with the Succession star earlier that morning.

“He’s in New York with a family member who’s quite sick, and he is so devoted as a family dad that he tried to drop out of my movie two weeks before we started shooting because he didn’t want to leave his kids,” Eisenberg said, referring to Culkin’s daughter Kinsey Sioux, 5, and son Wilder Wolf, 3, whom he shares with wife Jazz Charton.

“It’s real, it’s beautiful and it’s admirable – his devotion to his family. He’s one of these lucky people who’s brilliantly talented, but who, for some random luck of the cosmos, has his priorities in order,” Eisenberg continued. “So I’m so honored to accept this for him.”

Culkin’s win comes one month after he took home the award for Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture for his role in A Real Pain at the 2025 Golden Globes. During his acceptance speech, Culkin gushed over his “gorgeous wife” and celebrated the win in the press room by giving Charton, 36, a sweet kiss.

A Real Pain — which Eisenberg wrote and directed — centers around cousins David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Culkin) who travel to Poland to honor the homeland of their recently deceased grandmother, who had survived the Holocaust.

While discussing the film — which received a standing ovation at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2024 — Eisenberg recalled Culkin’s unusual preparation.

“Kieran wouldn’t learn the lines until the morning we were shooting — and you saw the movie — you saw he has, like, monologue after monologue,” Eisenberg said during a December 2024 appearance on Virgin Radio UK. “He was just so unpretentious, he would say, ‘What scene are we filming today?’ And I’d say, ‘It’s the scene [where] you have five pages of dialogue.’ And he’d say, ‘Let me take a look at it,’ as I give him my script, and he learns it in 30 seconds and he’s like, word perfect.”

Eisenberg shared that he heard of Culkin’s “crazed ability” from the directors of Succession and wondered if it stemmed from his acting at a “young” age. (Culkin, who made his acting debut at age 7, starred in the HBO series as Roman Roy from 2018 to 2023.)

“He tells me, ‘I could memorize anything in 30 seconds, but I can’t tell you the next day. I can’t tell you one word from it,’” Eisenberg said. “So he has some, temporary — you know, it’s muscle memory — some temporary bank.”