Rory Culkin is the actor directors reach for when they need a young man who is thinking too hard and saying too little. He is good at it, and in Columbus he shows a lightness the troubled parts rarely ask of him.
Fi1m perspective
In Columbus (2017), Rory Culkin, as Casey's colleague at the library, gets a speech about the difference between attention and interest. It is a small part in a quiet film, and the speech is funnier than it has any right to be, because Culkin plays it as a man who has clearly been turning this over for years and cannot believe someone has finally asked. We laughed, in a film that mostly asks you to sit still and look at buildings, and it is the first thing we think of when his name comes up. He does not raise his voice to get the laugh. He rarely raises it at all.
He has been doing this since childhood. He began in the early 1990s in small parts and cameos in films with his older brothers Macaulay and Kieran, and at eleven he led You Can Count on Me (2000) as Rudy Prescott, opposite Laura Linney, in a performance still talked about for how little it seemed to be acting. Signs (2002) put him in a studio film with Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix; Mean Creek (2004) put him back among the independents, and that is where he has mostly stayed, with a detour into Scream 4 (2011) and television work on Waco, Under the Banner of Heaven and Black Mirror.
The parts follow a pattern. Directors of independent dramas and of horror cast him as the troubled or intense young man, and he is often the supporting player in somebody else's festival film. The lead most people mention is Gabriel (2014), for Lou Howe, a man whose grip is slipping; Culkin has called it "the part I was most invested in of any of them", and said it took the most out of him. Lords of Chaos (2018), for Jonas Åkerlund, cast him as Euronymous in the Norwegian black metal scene, and he is known for going a long way into these roles, physically and otherwise. What the directors are after, we think, is the stillness. Culkin can stand in a scene and make you wonder what he is not saying.
The risk is that the film never gives him anything to not say. In Scream 4 he and Erik Knudsen are the two boys who explain the rules of a remake to a room, and Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson hand them a lecture rather than parts. Culkin delivers it with the eagerness of someone who has watched the films more times than is healthy, which is the right choice, but there is not much under it. He has had few chances at a mainstream lead since he was a boy, and on the evidence of Columbus that is the industry's loss more than his: given a good script and a director who lets him be light, Kogonada in this case, he is a pleasure.
He has now directed a short, Dear Shop Girl, which premiered in 2025. Having spent so long at the edge of other people's frames, he will know exactly where to put the camera.
Biography
Rory Culkin, also credited as Rory Hugh Culkin, is an American actor. He was born on 21 July 1989 in New York City and is the youngest brother of actors Macaulay Culkin and Kieran Culkin.
His film roles include Morgan Hess in Signs (2002), Charlie Walker in Scream 4 (2011), Gabriel in Columbus (2017) and Øystein 'Euronymous' Aarseth in Lords of Chaos (2018). On television he has appeared in Black Mirror (2011 and 2023) and is cast as Karl in the series Nocturne (2026).
