Al Weisel

 

Kieran Culkin: Getting Even With Dad

By Al Weisel

US Magazine, November 1998, p. 26

 

IT'S TOUGH GROWING UP IN THE SHADOW of an older brother—especially when he's the world's most famous child star. But with three movies coming up—this month's The Mighty and next year's She's All That and The Cider House Rules—Kieran Culkin is proving he's more than just Macaulay's kid brother. In The Mighty, Culkin, 16, stars opposite Sharon Stone as a severely handicapped boy with a terminal illness: According to Culkin's mother, Pat Brentrup, 44, Macaulay was a little envious that his brother got such a meaty role. "Mac said, 'I've never been in a movie this good," she recalls. "It's what inspired him to get back in the business." Macaulay, 18, has been cast as a drug-addicted hit man in the independent film Body Piercer.)

 

Though Culkin had to wear painful prosthetic devices to mimic his character's handicaps in The Mighty, it was nothing compared with the ordeal of shooting his last film, the never released drama Amanda. Along with the stress of having taken on his first starring role (he'd had bit parts in Home Alone, Father of the Bride and other films), Culkin had to contend with his parents' nasty breakup. In March 1995, his father, Kit Culkin, 53, moved out of the family's New York apartment. Three months later (a month before the filming of Amanda), Brentrup sued for custody of the six children who were still minors and for control of Macaulay's $17 million fortune, alleging that Kit was trying to sabotage the children's careers. Despite his estrangement from the family, Kit—a former sacristan at St. Joseph's Church in Manhattan who rose to power as Macaulay's manager—insisted on being on the Montana set of Amanda. He reportedly threw a fit during the shoot when he thought he was not being given enough time to help Kieran rehearse.

 

Although Kieran Culkin once wrote a note to the judge handling the custody battle asking that the court proceedings be held in secret to "spare my family any further embarrassment byway of the press," today he pulls no punches when discussing his father. "My dad had to get a house {near the Amanda set} because he's ever so important," says Culkin sarcastically. "I had to pay for it. It was a royal pain in the ass." Culkin hasn't seen his father since Brentrup was awarded custody of him in April 1997 and says he doesn't miss him, calling him a "waste of space."

 

Brentrup doesn't hold back either when she sits for a separate interview in New York's Central Park—just down the street from the Upper East Side neighborhood where the family once resided. "We had to fight in court to keep [Kit] off the set of The Mighty, because there was no way Kieran could work like that," she says. "We're an entirely different family now we're all happy. Living with that man was like being a prisoner of war. He's certifiable." (Kit Culkin, for whom there is an arrest warrant out, for his failing to appear in court after allegedly assaulting a New York Post photographer in March 1997, could not be reached for comment.) "He just went underground," says Kit Culkin's former lawyer Donald Frank. "I haven't seen him in a year and a half."

 

Life without father has restored some peace to the Culkin household. Kieran now lives in 'a seven-bedroom apartment on New York's Upper West Side with his mother and siblings Shane, 22 (who attends Marymount College), Dakota, 19, Quinn, 13, Christian, 11, and Rory, 9. When he's not working, Culkin attends his famous brother's alma mater, the Professional Children's School in New York City. "My school's very small—only five or six people in a class," he says. "I'm tired of it. I have very few friends there." Occasionally, Culkin meets kids who have another agenda besides friendship. "I'll catch on to people sometimes who just want to see Mac or see how we live," he says.

 

But Culkin doesn't sit home alone. After school, he's either hanging out with his best friend, fellow child W actor Brett Tabisel (who starred in Broadway's Big and also attends PCS), or spending time with his brothers. "We play video games and wrestle," he says. Several afternoons a week, he visits Macaulay's new Upper West Side apartment—the one he shares with his wife of four months, actress Rachel Miner, 18, and their menagerie of pets: four kittens, three pup- pies, two parrots, two rabbits and a ferret. Was Culkin surprised by his brother's sudden nuptials in June? "I knew they on were going to get married eventually," he says. "They're in love. They're all mushy-ooshy." He doesn't plan to follow in Macaulay's footsteps and become a teen groom, however. Says Culkin, grinning, "I'm going to stay young for awhile."■

 

Al Weisel is the co-author, with Larry Frascella, of Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause, being published in October 2005.

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