How Kieran, Macaulay and the Culkin Family Triumphed After Trauma: ‘They’ll Always Be Bonded’

Kieran Culkin knows what everyone thinks of his family. “My mom used to say when I was a kid, ‘How come whenever there’s a script about a dysfunctional family they always come to us?’” he told Entertainment Weekly on the Oscars red carpet on March 2, before going on to win the Best Supporting Actor trophy for A Real Pain (a movie about generational trauma). “But also,” he quipped, “what’s a functional family?”

His was certainly an unorthodox upbringing. He and his six siblings – Shane, 48, Dakota, who was tragically killed when she was hit by a car at age 29 in 2008, Macaulay, 44, Quinn, 40, Christian, 37, and Rory, 35 — were raised by their father, Kit, and mother, Patricia Brentrup, in a tiny apartment on NYC’s Upper East Side.

The kids, who all worked as actors at some point, continued to live in cramped quarters together even after Mac became a superstar from1990’s Home Alone (in which Kieran also had a part). “They’ll always be bonded by the incredibly unique childhood they had,” a source says of the siblings. “And they’ve stayed close as a family.”

Macaulay and Kieran Revealed Their Estranged Relationship With Their Father

But Kit is no longer part of it. Their struggling actor dad “was jealous. Everything that he tried to do in his life I excelled at before I was 10 years old,” Macaulay told Marc Maron on the “WTF” podcast in 2018, claiming that Kit “was abusive, physically and mentally — I can show you all my scars.” (Kit denied abuse allegations during a custody battle after he and Patricia split in 1995.)

While Kieran says he didn’t suffer any abuse, he and Kit have no relationship. “He wasn’t a good person and, yeah, probably not a good parent,” the Succession star, 42, told The Hollywood Reporter, adding that he’s only seen his father once since 1997. Her kids credit Patricia for making their childhood special. “I don’t know how she did it,” Kieran said at the Golden Globes of his mother, who married in 2012 and now lives in Montana, calling her an “amazing woman.”

Both Mac and Kieran have embraced fatherhood in a way their own dad never did. Kieran famously asked his wife of 12 years, Jazz Charton, for two more kids — they’ve already got daughter Kinsey, 5, and son Wilder, 3 — during his Oscars speech.

Macaulay, who wrote on Instagram last year that he has a “complicated relationship with Father’s Day,” shares sons Dakota, 3, and Carson, 2, with his fiancée and partner of eight years, fellow former child star Brenda Song.

Today, Kieran, Mac and youngest brother, Rory, are the only family members still acting regularly. As for their chaotic upbringing, they’ve mostly moved on, Kieran told The Guardian in December. “We’re already cooked, we’re baked,” he said when asked if they’d all done therapy together. “My godfather has this thing, he goes: ‘I will fully indulge anybody that wants to complain about their upbringing and childhood. I want to hear everything about that. And you can completely blame your parents for everything until you’re 30, and then figure s–t out.’ He’s oversimplifying it, but I like that.”