Kieran Culkin Finally Explained That Giant Stack of Bracelets He Always Wears

If you look at enough photos of Kieran Culkin from the last several decades (the Succession star has been acting since he was eight years old, having played the kid sibling of his real-life big brother Macaulay Culkin in 1990’s Home Alone), you may notice a recurring motif. There is almost always a pronounced stack of beaded and leather bracelets, sometimes numbering in the dozens, adorning the actor’s right forearm; his left wrist, meanwhile, is usually bare, save for some sort of nice watch.

In a recent video from Variety’s Actors on Actors series, Culkin and Sing Sing star Colman Domingo sit down for a lively chat that begins with a discussion of Culkin’s longtime sartorial quirk.

Domingo, gesturing to Culkin’s loaded wrists, asks, “Your bracelets, are they [symbolic]? Something your kids have given you?”

“Some of them are kids,” Culkin replies. One, he says, he even bought “as an experiment” from a seatback shopping catalog during a flight.

“This is a gift I bought on Virgin Airlines for my wife,” he explains, pointing to a multicolored beaded strand. “She didn’t like it, so I wear it now. … I was debating between a couple 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.”

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Domingo—following sound journalistic protocol here—follows up by inquiring about the other bracelets, “only because [they’re] so significant.”

Culkin runs down the beaded bracelets on his right wrist, identifying where each one came from: most from his children, others given to him by fans at events, one he got in Mexico with his wife. He adds that he received at least a few by simply asking the bracelet’s previous owner if they would give it to him, as though it were the shirt off their back.