Kieran Culkin decided it never hurt to ask. In public, while accepting awards, for his wife Jazz Charton to agree to having a third child together.
“About a year ago, I was on a stage like this and I very stupidly, publicly said that I wanted a third kid from her because she said if I won the award, she would give me the kid,” Culkin said onstage while accepting his Best Supporting Actor Oscar for A Real Pain in March. “Turns out she said that because she didn’t think I was going to win.”
Moreover, he continued, “She turned to me, and she said, ‘I will give you four when you win an Oscar.’ I held my hand out. She shook it, and I have not brought it up once until just now. You remember that, honey?”
Well, they’re halfway to settling up, the couple revealing that baby No. 3 is on the way when a visibly pregnant Charton joined Culkin on the red carpet at the Sept. 28 premiere of Waiting for Godot.
“Saw Keanu Reeves on broadway and now I’m 9 months pregnant…this is very on brand for me,” Charton posted the next day on Instagram. “I made a deal with this baby to let me make it to this before labor, not sure what it wants in return but I’m CLEARLY a woman of my word.”
Talk about your win-win scenarios.
While accepting his Golden Globe for Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture on Jan. 5, Kieran thanks a number of people, including his film’s costar and writer-director Jesse Eisenberg, then returned to his “gorgeous wife,” whom he thanked for “putting up with what you call my mania.”
He added, “I’m working on it, I’ve got a therapist now, it’s fine. It’s not fine, it’s a lot of work. We’ll see where that goes.”
But so far the brand of charm that he used to win her affections in the first place seems to be working just fine.
When they met at a New York bar in 2012, Culkin sidled up to Charton and introduced himself.
“I said, ‘I’m Kieran. You have an English accent. What’s your name?'” he recalled to The Hollywood Reporter in 2021. “She said, ‘Jazz.’ I said, ‘J-A-Z-Z, like the music?’ And she said, ‘Yeah.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s f–king stupid.'”
That opening line could’ve fallen flat for some, but he apparently struck just the right tone for the London-born Charton, who laughed and then married him the following year.
(Her reaction to his Globe win is an indicator they remain on the same page, the 36-year-old writing on Instagram, “Okay come on this is getting ridiculous now. I’m so proud of this wonderful manic man. What a dream to watch this all happen to one of the most hardworking but also somehow the least ambitious person I’ve ever known. Beautiful.”)
They tied the knot on June 8, 2013, eloping in Iowa during a cross-country road trip, and began their lives together in the one-bedroom East Village apartment Culkin had bought a decade earlier.
The couple were still living there when they welcomed daughter Kinsey Sioux on Sept. 13, 2019, but decamped to a roomier space in Brooklyn before having their painstakingly named son Wilder Wolf on Aug. 17, 2021.
Charton posted a rare photo of their kids (not showing their faces) in an Instagram tribute to Culkin last June, writing, “Happy Father’s Day to this DADDY. Considering he didn’t grow up with a good example of what a dad is he’s really quite good at it.”
So she shares her husband’s ability to encapsulate a more serious issue—in this case the Culkin kids’ complicated relationship with their father, which older brother Macaulay Culkin has also spoken about—in a funny but poignant way.
Overall, though, Charton’s page is a celebration of her and Culkin’s hilarity-tinged love-fest, her first pinned photo featuring the pair all glammed up while he pours a glass of champagne.
She captioned the Jan. 16, 2024, post, “Here is the exact moment I realized I may have made a huge mistake by JOKINGLY saying ‘we can have another baby if you ever win an Emmy.'”
It turned out, Culkin can be a real pain once he gets an idea in his head.
“Thank you for sharing your life with me and for giving me two amazing kids,” the Succession star said while accepting the 2023 Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series. “And, Jazz, I want more. You said, maybe, if I win.”
He explained moments later in the press room that he had been asking Charton “for awhile” about having a third child.
“My wife, Jazz, said, ‘Maybe if you win the Emmy, haha,'” Culkin said. “I didn’t bring it up for months, and then when I won the Globe [last week], I said, ‘Do you remember what you said?’ And she goes, ‘No! what did I say?’ So, I told her, and it all came back to her.”
Culkin added, “So, she spent the whole week being nervous. So, instead of talking to her in private like a human, I blasted it on stage, which was very rude. That’s it. That’s the whole story.”
But when he and Charton first got married, Culkin wasn’t sure that having even one child was in the cards for them.
“It was not something that either my wife and I ever pursued,” he told NPR in 2021. “We sort of thought, you know, if it happens, it happens. But if it doesn’t, you know, hey, that’ll be great, too.”
So while he wasn’t entirely sold on the idea before becoming a dad, parenthood was “quite actually the greatest thing,” Culkin said. “And it doesn’t matter how hard it gets, unlike anything else. Like, you know, you have a job that’s too difficult or a relationship that’s too hard. You just, like, end it. It’s like, done. Move on. It doesn’t matter how hard it gets. It’s always fulfilling and always wonderful.”
In fact, Culkin has pondered whether he shouldn’t just call it a career in order to spend more time with his family.
“I feel like what I’m supposed to do is be a stay-at-home dad,” he told Esquire in 2023. “That’s where I feel like I’m the most me. And anything that takes me away from that is wrong.”
But while he remains in demand, he makes sure his family’s with him in spirit wherever he goes.
The accessory-favoring actor wears two signet rings, one engraved with his daughter’s first initial and the other with his son’s. He also bought himself and Charton Rolexes after he shot the first season of Succession. And a number of the beaded bracelets he regularly wears on his right arm (and which were on display at the Globes) are from his children, though one colorful bauble is actually a rejected present for Charton that he picked out from an in-flight catalogue.
“This is a gift I bought on Virgin Airlines for my wife,” Culkin explained to Colman Domingo during a recent chat for Variety’s Actors on Actors series. “She didn’t like it, so I wear it now…I was debating between a couple of things and I was like, ‘She’s probably gonna hate this, and if she does, I get to wear it.’ But at least I gave her a gift.”
And it’s stories like these that are the gifts that keeps on giving.
Meanwhile, the couple were in Paris for Fashion Week when the 2025 Oscar nominations were announced. Since Culkin doesn’t do social media, Charton posted a shot of him pouring two glasses of champagne on their balcony, the Eiffel Tower in the distant background, to her Instagram Story, writing, “Let’s f–king gooooooo.”
As if it wasn’t clear Culkin had out-classed Roman Roy in the romance department, catch up on the love lives of his fellow Succession alums:
Brian Cox
Logan Roy, media mogul and father of four adult kids who are each unhappy in their own way, is on his third marriage, with the occasional other woman popping in and out of his bedroom.
Cox is also a father of four: Son Alan (also an actor), and daughter Margaret with Caroline Burt, whom he was married to from 1968 to 1986, and sons Orson and Torin with his second wife, NicoleAnsari-Cox.
“I was just in my twenties when I got married to Caroline,” the Scottish actor wrote in his 2021 memoir Putting the Rabbit in the Hat. “Far too young. But I wanted the stability of marriage and kids. I wasn’t one of those middle-class actor-types, taking drugs and letting it all hang out.”
He called Ansari-Cox, an actress and theater director, his “soulmate.” She also, incidentally, made a winning cameo at Logan Roy’s funeral as Sally-Ann, his mistress from his second marriage to Caroline (Harriet Walters), who drolly introduces the newcomer as “my Kerry” to Logan’s third wife Marcia (Hiam Abbass) and his most recent girlfriend, Kerry (Zoe Winters).
Alan Ruck
As the poor little rich boy no one seems to expect anything of, Logan’s eldest son Connor, from his first marriage, wavers between being the least nasty and most delusional of the siblings. The aspiring presidential candidate finally got to marry former escort Willa (Justine Lupe), who sorta likes him—but accepting his largesse and promising not to leave today is kinda like love, right?
In real life, Ruck and first wife Claudia Stefany share daughter Emma and son Sam. Ruck is also dad to daughter Vesper and son Larkin with The Killing star Mireille Enos, his wife since 2008.
Enos and a newly divorced Ruck met while doing a play together in New York. The first time she saw her future husband, Enos told People, “Alan walked in the door and my brain said, ‘Oh, there he is.’ It was a moment of recognition of some other person who was going to change my life.”
Jeremy Strong
It was easy to forget Kendall Roy was a separated father of two young kids because he was so wholly consumed with taking his dad down.
In real life, Emmy winner Strong is still a bit of a jet-setter, but navigating friendlier skies: Strong and his wife since 2016, Emma Wall, split their time between homes in New York and her native Denmark. They’re also parents of three young daughters.
“He does a really good job of maintaining what he’s doing,” Wall told the New Yorker about her famously intense-on-the-job husband in 2021, “but also creating a space for the family and a normal life.”
Sarah Snook
Siobhan “Shiv” Roy isn’t entirely sure why she got married, either, other than it seemed like a respectable move and she felt some sort of love-like emotion for Tom Wambsgans. And now those chickens are coming home to roost, with Tom ending season three on Team Logan and shanking his wife with the proverbial shiv, just as the Roy siblings seemed poised to get the better of their father.
Snook’s domestic situation feels more hopeful. “I’m in bliss,” the Australian actress told Australian Vogue in 2021 after quietly marrying comedian Dave Lawson, her longtime “best mate” whom she fell in love with during pandemic lockdown.
“It’s been a ride,” she acknowledged. “There’s so much heartache and sadness in the world, but on a micro personal level, I’ve been very fortunate.”
Snook, whose real-life pregnancy became Shiv’s conundrum, and Lawson welcomed their first child together in May 2023.
Matthew Macfadyen
Tom Wambsgans thought he was hitting the jackpot, marrying the woman of his dreams in Shiv and securing himself an executive post in the family business, Waystar RoyCo.
Well, his wife may have broached the topic of non-monogamy hours after they said “I do,” but Tom did end up on the Succession equivalent of the Iron Throne, no prison toilet wine in sight.
In reality the English actor—who won a Best Supporting Actor Emmy for his efforts in 2022—is doing quite well.
He’s been married to actress Keeley Hawes since 2004, and is stepdad to her son Miles and father to their daughter Maggie and son Ralph.
“It was a bit bumpy at the time,” Macfadyen told the New York Times in 2023 about the beginning of his and Hawes’ relationship (a headline-making extramarital affair on her end), “but it’s fine now.”
Kieran Culkin
To say Roman Roy has intimacy issues would be a bit of an understatement.
But Culkin celebrated 10 years of marriage to wife Jazz Charton on June 8, 2023, and they’re parents to two kids with a third on the way.
That being said, the actor does have a bit of a mouth on him, not unlike his quick-witted character.
When Culkin met his future wife at a bar in New York, he recalled to The Hollywood Reporter, “I said, ‘I’m Kieran. You have an English accent. What’s your name?’ She said, ‘Jazz.’ I said, ‘J-A-Z-Z, like the music?’ And she said, ‘Yeah.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s f–king stupid.'”
We’re guessing he said that with a certain Romanesque charm because, reader, she laughed. And married him.
J. Smith-Cameron
Let’s just say, Gerri Kellman didn’t exactly help Roman with his intimacy issues, but the release he got from being chastised by a successful older woman certainly fit the profile.
Cameron has been married to filmmaker Kenneth Lonergan since 2000 and they’re parents to daughter Nellie
Nicholas Braun
In October 2021, Braun told the New York Times that he was hoping to be in his first long-term relationship one day.
“I do believe it’ll happen at the right time with the right person,” said the actor, who was also writing what he described as a “relationship traumedy” when not busy filming. “Until then, it’s fun to meet people and see what works.”
And that time finally came thanks to film executive Hyunji Ward.
“You are the absolute joy of my life,” he wrote on Instagram in March 2025. “You make me my best self!!”
Jesse Armstrong
The British writer-producer’s crafty mind may have created Succession, but at home he’s just a fellow who’s lived, as the New Yorker reported in 2021, “in the same unflashy part of South London for almost three decades” with his wife and their two kids.
Armstrong met his missus when they were both students at University of Manchester and she works for the National Health Service.
“We might do a new kitchen,” the five-time Emmy winner told the magazine. “So that will be corrupting.”
(Originally published Jan. 6, 2025, at 1:19 p.m. PT)
