- Culkin won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor
- The A Real Pain star has also won an Emmy for his work in HBO’s Succession
- Culkin would need a Tony and a Grammy to complete the EGOT
Kieran Culkin’s perfect award season culminated with the Oscars, last night, where the Home Alone star took home the award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in A Real Pain.
Culkin’s turn in Jesse Eisenberg’s road trip comedy has seen the Succession actor pick up a Golden Globe, BAFTA, Screen Actors Guild and Critic’s Choice Award in the same category over the last few weeks.
And the 42-year-old’s Oscars success has now left him halfway to landing an EGOT.
An EGOT, for those of you unfamiliar with the term, is the winning of an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony award. The term was originally coined by Miami Vice actor Philip Michael Thomas, in 1984, when he was describing what his aspirations as an entertainer were. And while Thomas was not successful with his mission to land the mythical EGOT, his term has lived on forever, being brought to prominence as part of a storyline in NBC sitcom 30 Rock, in 2009.
Only 27 people have completed the EGOT run in history, with six of those completing it via noncompetitive or honorary awards.
The likes of Mel Brooks, Mike Nichols, Whoopi Goldberg, John Legend, Viola Davis, Jennifer Hudson and Elton John are among the 21 competitive EGOT winners with Barbra Streisand, Liza Minnelli, James Earl Jones, Quincy Jones, Harry Belafonte and Frank Marshall making up the noncompetitive winners.
Following his work in A Real Pain, Culkin is now set for Broadway, where he will star alongside Better Call Saul star Bob Odenkirk and comedian Bill Burr in a production of Glengarry Glen Ross, the Pulitzer Prize winning David Mamet play, which was adapted into a film starring Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon and Alan Arkin, in 1992.
Glengarry has received widespread acclaim since its first outing in 1984, landing 10 Tony nominations along the way. Out of those 10 nominations, Mamet’s play has won three, including Best Featured Actor in a Play twice, for Joe Mantegna (1984) and Liev Schreiber (2005). Both times the winning actors were playing the role of Richard Roma, the same role Culkin will play when he treads the boards at Palace Theatre on Broadway this spring. Al Pacino also received an Academy Award nomination for portraying the same character in the 1992 film adaptation.
Should Culkin follow in Mantegna and Schreiber’s footsteps and land the Tony for Best Featured Actor for his portrayal of Roma, he would need only a Grammy to complete the EGOT sweep.
And Culkin would not even need to record an album to pick up a Grammy. In 2023 Viola Davis, herself an EGOT winner, won a Grammy for Best Audiobook, Narration and Storytelling Recording for her reading of Finding Me. Being an extremely in-demand actor with an immediately identifiable voice, Culkin could quite easily bag himself a fair amount of audiobook work, should he choose to do so, meaning he would be in contention for a Grammy without needing to pick up a single instrument. He could also just drop a seminal rap LP and take us all by surprise, of course.
