You’d expect HBO’s Succession star Kieran Culkin to live in a penthouse overlooking Central Park. For over two decades, he did the opposite—calling a one-bedroom East Village apartment home while his career climbed from indie films to an Emmy-winning lead role on one of television’s most acclaimed dramas. Even now that his family has moved to a larger place in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, the apartment he kept for more than twenty years—and the life he built inside it—says more about Kieran Culkin than any luxury penthouse ever could.
The East Village Apartment That Never Changed
Culkin moved into a modest one-bedroom apartment in the East Village around 2001, when he was just 19 years old. That same building became his anchor through years of smaller film roles, Off-Broadway theater work, and eventually the role that would define his career: Roman Roy on HBO’s Succession.
“I’ve lived in the same apartment since I was 19,” he told New York Magazine in 2022. “You see how we live? That’s just how it is.”
Even as Succession transformed him from a working actor into one of the most recognizable faces on television, Culkin stayed put. No upgrade. No move to a trendier neighborhood. The apartment—white walls, gray carpet, a window overlooking the building next door—stayed exactly what it had always been: a real home, not a statement.
A Family Outgrowing Every Room
After Culkin married Jazz Charton in 2013, the couple tied the knot during a road trip through Iowa, and the apartment became a family home. Their daughter, Kinsey Sioux, arrived, followed by their son, Wilder Wolf. And slowly, the one-bedroom layout that had been manageable for a single guy became a daily negotiation of space.
During the pandemic, the squeeze hit its limit. Kinsey took the bedroom. Jazz, pregnant with Wilder, joined Culkin on a mattress in the living room. “We live in New York City apartments—I’m sure it’s similar to this—like, the corner of our bedroom is the nursery,” Culkin told Chris Moyles on Radio X in August 2022. “So, we weren’t really prepared for all that.”
He described the arrangement with a mix of humor and resignation: “Eventually the kid took our bedroom and then my wife—who was pregnant the second time while we were shooting through the pandemic—we’re sleeping on a mattress on the living room floor because the baby has the bedroom.”
Jazz had a sharper take. As Culkin recalled: “She at one point turns to me, and she goes, ‘You see how we live, right? You know you’re on a hit TV show, right?”
The Move to Greenpoint
About a year ago, the family made the shift. Culkin, Jazz, Kinsey, and Wilder moved to a larger, three-bedroom home in Greenpoint, Brooklyn—finally giving each child a room and the adults something they hadn’t had in years: a door that closed.
But Culkin wasn’t ready to fully let go. He still pays rent on the East Village apartment and uses it as an office—a detail that reveals how much the space means to him beyond practicality. For someone who spent his entire adult life in that one apartment, the move wasn’t about upgrading. It was about adapting.
Greenpoint, with its quieter streets and neighborhood feel, offers the same low-key quality that kept him in the East Village for so long—not a prestige address, but a place where a family can settle in without an audience.
Emmy Gold and a Very Public Request
By the time the move happened, Culkin was riding a wave of career recognition that would have seemed improbable during those early East Village years. In January 2024, he won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Television Drama. Then, at the 76th Primetime Emmy Awards that September, he took home the award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for his final season as Roman Roy.
His acceptance speech became its own moment. Turning to Jazz in the audience, he said: “Thank you for sharing your life with me and giving me two amazing kids, Kinsey Sioux and Wilder Wolf. I love you so much. And Jazz, I want more. You said maybe if I win!”
Backstage, he elaborated: “A couple of months ago—I have been asking for a while—my wife said, ‘Maybe if you win the Emmy,’ and I didn’t bring it up for months. Then, when I won the Globe, I said, ‘Remember what you said,’ and she didn’t remember, and I spent all week nervous, and instead of talking to her like a human, I blasted her on stage, and it was very rude.”
The roles kept coming. His performance in Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain (2024) earned him a 2025 Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor—another milestone for someone who, by his own account, didn’t make serious money until his forties. With an estimated net worth of around $5 million, the financial reality has shifted dramatically. But the instincts haven’t.
What Succession Showed—And What It Didn’t
There’s an irony worth noting. The Upper West Side duplex penthouse used as Roman Roy’s home in Succession—located on Amsterdam Avenue—represents a world of generational wealth, designer interiors, and the kind of curated luxury that only exists on screen. Culkin’s real life has always been the inverse: a walk-up apartment with no doorman, no private elevator, and no design team.
That contrast isn’t incidental. It’s central to what made Culkin’s portrayal of Roman so convincing. He understood the performance of wealth precisely because he never lived inside it.
What It All Says About Him
Kieran Culkin’s story isn’t really about an apartment. It’s about the deliberate choice to stay grounded in a life that had nothing to do with the world he was depicting on television every week. Twenty-plus years in the same building. A mattress on the living room floor. A neighborhood chosen for its normalcy, not its prestige.
In a city and an industry where square footage signals status, Culkin’s version of success looks different. Not a penthouse with a skyline view—just a place that felt like his. And even now, in a bigger Brooklyn home with room for the kids to spread out, he’s holding on to that East Village apartment. Not because he needs the space. Because he’s not ready to stop being the person he was there.
