For four seasons, Kieran Culkin portrayed one of TV’s most sarcastic characters in the sexually repressed Roman Roy, but the billionaire’s skittishness about having kids was nowhere to be found during the actor’s acceptance speech at the 75th Primetime Emmy Awards. (See the night’s biggest Emmy winners here!) Rather, upon earning television’s loftiest acting prize, Culkin took the moment to publicly address his desire to have another kid with wife Jazz Charton, and later explained where that impulse came from.
Kieran Culkin's Emmy Request
Just a week after Culkin became a 2024 Golden Globes winner for the first time as a solo actor, his name was once again called out as one of the final winners at the delayed 2023 Emmys, and after tearfully thanking his mother and manager, jokingly referring to the decades that he’s worked with the latter, he addressed his potentially growing family with the following:
My beautiful wife Jazz, thank you for sharing your life with me and giving me two amazing kids, Kinsey Sioux and Wilder Wolf, I love you so many and so much. And Jazz: I want more. [Laughs.] You said ‘maybe’ if I win.
That emotional and slightly charming plea was a far cry from his Globes acceptance speech, which was arguably most memorable for Culkin taking a shot at Pedro Pascal, a fellow Best Actor nominee honored for his work in The Last of Us. (Incidentally, Pascal landed a zinger of his own by jokingly blaming his injured shoulder on the Succession star.) It likely would have been a far different night had Culkin brought up having more kids with Pascal.
Kieran Culkin Explains Why He Brought Up Having More Kids
The adorable on-camera moment sparked a sweet reaction from Jazz Charton herself, who mouthed "I love you" to her hubby from the audience as he thanked her. And both she and seatmate Sarah Snook were taken aback when the baby request came out. Speaking with press behind the scenes (via THR), Culkin said it's a conversation that they've danced around before, with the Emmy nomination serving as something of an unofficial catalyst. As he put it:
A couple of months ago, I’d been asking for a while, and my wife, Jazz, said, ‘Maybe if you win the Emmy.' And I didn’t bring it up for months, and then when I won the Globe, I said, ‘Remember what you said?’ She said, ‘What, I don’t remember,’ and then I told her and it all came back to her.
As far as professional accomplishments go, Kieran Culkin hit the apex by kinda-sorta sweeping awards season so far with wins for his final season as Roman Roy. And one can understand why it might have seemed like a lofty enough stipulation to put in place far ahead of time, especially if there wasn't any overarching confidence about emerging victorious.
Still, Kieran Culkin addressed that it was possibly the wrong medium to make such a personal appeal, calling it a "rude" move after the fact. He continued:
So she spent the whole week being nervous, and instead of talking to her in private like a human, I just blasted her onstage, which was very rude. Anyway, that’s the whole story, the end.
And in case anyone wondered, Culkin flat out denied that he would choose to name their potential third child anything "cute" like Roman or Emmy. Personally I'm hoping he goes for the completely ironic moniker of "Eldest Boy," in reference to Jeremy Strong's best series finale quotes as Kendall Roy.
The 2023 Emmy Awards can be streamed in full now with a Hulu subscription, and the next edition will presumably be arriving later this year, without any strike delays holding the TV Academy's efforts back.
