jeremy strong, kieran culkin, and the cost of caring too much
On visible ambition and the mortifying ordeal of being too earnest for your own good. When did effort become our culture's ultimate ick?
On Monday, I woke up to approximately 27 notifications on my phone, half of them from my American film friends who had apparently live-texted me the entire Oscars ceremony while I was blissfully asleep across the pond. I thumbed through the messages with one eye open, morning light barely filtering through my bedroom blinds in London.
"KIERAN WON"
"strong's face when they announced culkin omg"
Culkin's acceptance speech started sweetly enough before derailing into what I can only describe as Oscar-winner-demands-offspring territory. After thanking his collaborators, he resurrected his Emmy bit about wife Jazz promising him "four kids when you win an Oscar," complete with a deadpan "Ye of little faith—no pressure" while cameras zoomed in on her face. The audience roared. My face did that thing where you're trying not to physically recoil. Kieran had already told this exact ‘joke’ last awards season — after which his wife likely got hounded by strangers afterward. Nothing says "I'm the chill, unserious one" quite like publicly reminding your spouse about their reproductive debt on Hollywood's biggest night.
In the months leading up to the ceremony, the ‘golden boy’ narrative had taken shape neatly. Kieran Culkin was the chill, effortlessly talented guy everyone wanted to grab a pint with; Jeremy Strong, who delivered my personal favorite performance among the nominees, was the one who cared too much, tried too hard, said words like "dramaturgically" with complete earnestness.
When the Oscar nominations initially dropped, a friend of mine texted me a similar reaction to the internet’s: "Did you see Kieran's wife's Insta? Champagne on a balcony in Paris while Jeremy has just written a novel-length statement lol".
It reminded my time at a film festival afterparty two years ago, where I watched a guy in a rumpled blazer passionately describe Tár as a "revelation of the Apollonian-Dionysian dialectic that transmutes artistic privilege into a sacred violence of the soul". Or something like that. When two industry acquaintances caught my eye and whispered, "Someone tell him it's just a movie about a mean lady conductor," I laughed along, then immediately hated myself. I wish I’d come up with that! I still carry that moment with a twinge of shame.
The Jeremy Strong situation reminds me of my first serious post-uni job at this social media marketing agency in London. There was this strategist who color-coded her notes and stayed late preparing for client meetings. She'd send emails with phrases like "publish more cross-platform synergetic ephemeral content" when she could've just said "post more Stories." At the Christmas party, she cornered the CEO to talk about Facebook’s algorithm changes (ah, to be working on social in 2017!) while everyone else was doing tequila shots with the creative team. Then when promotion time came around, it went to this guy whose main qualification seemed to be that he'd organized the agency pub crawl and knew everyone's drink order by heart. I still remember her face when the announcement came. For the record, I thought she was way ahead of her time in that pesky industry.
The internet has spent years dunking on Jeremy Strong for the crime of caring too much. For submitting a childhood photo of himself standing outside the 1993 Oscars alongside his nomination statement, writing with total sincerity that "I have devoted my life to the attempt to do genuine work that would be worthy of this honor." For treating acting like it's heart surgery. Meanwhile, Kieran pours champagne on a Parisian balcony and we collectively swoon.
Look, I fucking love what Culkin does. The guy's a master at balancing acidic cynicism with unexpected vulnerability, and his performance in A Real Pain broke my heart in twelve different places. But scrolling through online reactions, something nags at me: we've collectively decided visible effort is embarrassing. When someone says "I have devoted my life" to anything, our instinct is mockery rather than respect.
And honestly? I'm sick of it.
why do we mock people who care too much?
Our cultural obsession with authenticity has reached a strange impasse. We claim to want realness but recoil when it arrives unfiltered. In 2025, the most damning critique isn't being cruel or stupid, but caring out loud. Nowhere is this judgment more savage than toward people who give an actual damn about art.
Take the recent viral moment from this year’s SAG Awards that launched a thousand memes. Timothée Chalamet had just won Best Actor for his portrayal of Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown when he broke the cardinal rule of public ambition: he admitted he had some. "I know we're in a subjective business," Chalamet said to a room full of his peers, "but the truth is, I'm really in pursuit of greatness." He went on to name-check Michael Jordan alongside Daniel Day-Lewis and Viola Davis, calling the award "a little more fuel—a little more ammo to keep going."
In the room, people applauded. On the internet, the reaction splintered between those who found his transparency refreshing and those who found it embarrassingly earnest. "Timothée Chalamet just became the ultimate try-hard," read one popular Instagram post.
Then came the photos that made Instagram absolutely lose its shit: Timmy and Jeremy Strong, deep in conversation at the SAG afterparty. Two skinny white boys in designer clothes, looking intensely at each other. "They're having a thesaurus off." "You just know some crazy vocab words were being exchanged here."
Because what were they actually doing? Talking. About their work, probably. Maybe comparing notes on playing real people. Maybe discussing the acoustic qualities of Mercedes-Benz Stadium. Maybe Strong was asking where to get a better freaking blazer. We don't know! But we all filled in the blank with "something pretentious" because we’ve now decided that anyone who takes acting seriously must be insufferable.
The Jeremy Strong pile-on has been simmering since that 2021 New Yorker profile dropped, and it says way more about us than him. I'm not suggesting we need to light candles at the altar of method acting or whatever—I have my limits too. But the absolute glee with which people mock a guy for...being invested in his profession? That impulse is weird.
Meanwhile, there's something about Kieran Culkin's approach that just feels more accessible. In interviews, he comes across like that friend who's weirdly good at everything but never makes a big deal about it. Listening to his Smartless appearance, I laughed when he told the guys, "My wife made fun of me...I was doing a play and I was like, 'I need to go to work,' and she would say 'What you do is literally called play.'" His response: "She's right. Maybe I'll go out there and just have fun with it and just stick around. This is not extra serious."
When Jesse Eisenberg's meticulously prepared approach came up, Kieran just shrugged it off: "I don't like to rehearse, and I just look it over really quickly and go, 'Oh, those are the words. I'll just...go.'" There's a certain charm to his "yeah, I just kind of showed up" vibe that makes you want to be his best friend. I get the appeal. I really do. His casual relationship with his own talent is honestly pretty refreshing in an industry full of people who act like they're curing cancer.
privilege is never having to say "i'm trying"
I've been tiptoeing around it, but let's just say it: Jeremy Strong makes people uncomfortable because he's a class outsider. The guy grew up in working-class Sudbury with a father who worked as a juvenile detention center social worker and a mother who was a hospice nurse. His childhood "vacations" consisted of sitting in a canoe propped on cinder blocks in his backyard, pretending to travel because his family couldn't afford to leave the Boston area. That makeshift play feels almost too on-the-nose as metaphor. The working-class kid using imagination to bridge the gap between his reality and his aspirations.
He got into Yale on talent, worked multiple campus jobs while studying, and spent nearly a decade post-graduation as an assistant to playwrights and directors, taking unpaid theater roles and waiter gigs to survive.
But Strong didn’t compromise, despite not having the resources to keep going. As he referenced in an interview in 2022, he even turned down a small role in Captain America: The First Avenger as the ‘pre-superhero’ body double. “I was broke,” he said, “I needed money. I considered it. But that's my story of LA. It was just never going to happen for me here”. As one Redditor noted, "I think Jeremy Strong often gets overlooked because of classism, he's from a working class background and is unashamedly passionate about acting and such enthusiasm can seem a bit 'uncool."
The unspoken rule of elite spaces is that you're never supposed to look like you're trying to be there.
You're supposed to act like you belong effortlessly. It's why old money whispers and new money screams. It's why the preppiest clothes are the most worn-in. It's why the richest people dress like they found their clothes in a dumpster behind a Patagonia store.
Strong breaks this rule. He shows the sweat. He makes public the effort it takes to transform yourself into something else, whether that's Kendall Roy or Roy Cohn. And that visibility of effort is deeply uncomfortable to people who've spent their lives pretending their privileges are just natural qualities.
Culkin exists at the opposite end of this spectrum, and for good reason. He has undeniably worked hard and earned his success. Anyone suggesting otherwise is missing the forest for the trees. But he grew up on film sets. His first role was at age 6 in Home Alone, playing his real-life brother's cousin. Acting is his birthright as much as his profession. The studied casualness with which he approaches his craft isn't just a personality trait, it's a luxury afforded to those who never had to wonder if they belonged in the room. As he told The Hollywood Reporter: “Suddenly, around the age of 20, I had a phone call with Emily [his manager], and she said, ‘Something, something, something, your career,'” he recalled. “I remember having a panic and going, ‘I have a fucking career?’ I was just a 6-year-old, and I was doing this, and I never once chose to do this for myself.”
Despite delivering a few acclaimed performances in his early career (Igby Goes Down! Scott Pilgrim vs. the World! Infinity Baby!), Culkin could afford to step away from Hollywood for several years, explaining: “It wasn’t until about halfway through the first season of Succession, where I came home and I was having a talk with my wife, and I was like, ‘I think I know I want to do for a living. I want to be an actor.’ I had been doing it for about 31 years at that point. I spent a good couple of decades trying to figure out what else to do and then landed on the thing I was doing.”
What's fascinating is how this dichotomy of life circumstances reproduces itself across creative industries. Look at music, where we instantly recognize the difference between someone who's been trained since childhood versus someone who taught themselves. Or literature, where we can somehow sense which writers attended elite MFA programs and which ones wrote their first novels while working customer service jobs. The actual work might be equally impressive, but we respond differently to the background hum of effort, celebrating the seemingly effortless while side-eyeing the visibly ambitious. Think about startup culture, where we celebrate the dropout billionaire who "just had an idea in his dorm room" over the immigrant founder who spent years meticulously building a business.
This obsession with effortless success is class warfare dressed in cashmere.
When we treat effort as embarrassing, we're essentially saying: only those born into the right circumstances deserve to succeed without struggle. Everyone else should work just as hard, but for god's sake, don't let us see you doing it. Jeremy Strong told the New Yorker in his infamous profile: "To me, the stakes are life and death. I take [acting] that seriously." Everyone rushed to mock him, screenshot the quote with "lmao" captions, turn his intensity into group chat fodder. Ambition is tacky, they'll tell you. Wanting things badly is pathetic, they'll remind you. But for someone who wasn't born into the industry, yes, the stakes probably do feel that high.
method vs. vibes: the eternal hollywood showdown
The Strong/Culkin discourse doubles as a referendum on American film acting itself. This debate's been brewing since Brando mumbled his way through Streetcar and everyone lost their minds. The whole "is Culkin just playing himself" take is literally what they said about Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant back in the day. Meanwhile Strong's over there channeling spirits like he's Daniel Day-Lewis's anxious cousin. We're stuck in this false choice between "real" and "technical" when the most electric stuff happens in the messy middle.
Strong's elaborate construction builds such an impenetrable reality that you can't see the seams. In the quiet moments of The Apprentice, when Strong as Roy Cohn calculates his next manipulation, there exists a terrifying honesty—the character simultaneously understands his own monstrosity while believing completely in his righteousness. This man changes the molecular structure of a room when he walks in.
Meanwhile Culkin provides something equally essential, the exhilaration of watching someone trapeze without a net. Watch him in A Real Pain as grief and depression simmer under that carefully maintained veneer of biting humor. He gives us spontaneity in an age when every cultural product feels focus-grouped into oblivion. They're both making us forget we're watching something fake, just coming at it from opposite ends. 'I object to when actors call themselves "storytellers,”' Culkin told Colman Domingo during Variety's Actors on Actors in December. 'I don't really like that. Sorry, Jeremy. I don't think I'm telling the story.'
(Context: The two had previously sat next to each other during Variety’s Actor's roundtable where Jeremy specifically referred to himself as a storyteller).
That moment is the WHOLE divide right there. Strong positions himself as this narrative architect while Culkin rejects ownership of the narrative entirely. Culkin's approach suggests we're most authentic when we drop the pretense and just exist. One thinks we're most authentic when we strip away the pretense and just exist; the other believes we gotta dig through layers of conditioning to find something true. Get out of your own way versus tear yourself apart to rebuild.
Of course, this neat binary I'm creating glosses over the obvious: these two actors deeply respect each other's work. This was on full display at the Oscars when Culkin singled out Strong: “Jeremy, you're amazing in The Apprentice. I love your work. It's f---ing great.” Then caught himself: “I'm not supposed to single anyone out. It's favoritism,” Culkin added sheepishly. “Anyway, but you were great.” This callout tells you everything about the genuine admiration underneath all the narrative nonsense we've built around them (even though I think Kieran loves grinding Jeremy for the lols).
The industry's shift toward Culkin-style naturalism is, of course, economically advantageous. Netflix and other platforms operate on compressed schedules that leave no room for Method intensity. A TV series that once produced 13 episodes over a traditional season now routinely delivers 8-10 episodes on brutal timelines. Strong's insistence on remaining in character throughout Succession filming created documented tensions with production (according to Brian Cox anyway). When Cox calls Strong's method "a particularly American disease," he's articulating the economic reality where productions cannot afford the luxury of accommodating time-intensive preparation. When Strong says he's "still going to do whatever it takes," he's positioning himself against an industry increasingly designed to favor the actor who can nail the scene in two takes and move on (side note: David Fincher x Jeremy Strong collab when?).
in defense of visible effort
As
points out in her newsletter , we're trapped in an actor crisis where narratives trump performances. "It's hard to discuss this stuff without sounding petty," she notes, reflecting on how Culkin's seemingly effortless charm constructed the perfect Oscar narrative. Voter psychology leans toward "likability"—who would you rather grab a beer with?Most revealing remains Strong's response to all the criticism: "Am I going to adjust or compromise the way that I've worked my whole life and what I believe in? There wasn't a flicker of doubt about that." You’ve got to give it to the guy, there's something almost envious about his dedication. The way he isolates himself on set, creates elaborate backstories, and speaks about his characters as though they were living entities. His intensity makes us uncomfortable because it shatters the illusion that great art happens without struggle.
This brings us to the heart of the matter: The machine that processes actors like Strong and Culkin spits out digestible narratives where complexity dies on the operating table.
We've developed an entire lexicon for dissecting the cult of personality around performers while remaining functionally illiterate when discussing the actual work. We can discuss who's dating whom or who's fighting with a director, but we stumble when asked to talk about the work itself. We've become fluent in personalities and forgotten the language of craft. Maybe that's why every celeb interview asks about process rather than purpose. It's easier to ask Strong about his weird text messages than to reckon with what he achieves through them.
I find myself drawn to Strong because he feels like permission to care deeply. To be deemed unlikeable for the sake of art. There's genuine risk in someone who refuses to don the armor of irony that the rest of us hide behind (like my panicked laughter at that film festival when Blazer Guy earnestly called Tár a revelation of the Apollonian-Dionysian dialectic). And we’ve seen the repercussions of it.
So let’s call bullshit on all of it. Give me the Jeremy Strongs who text weird shit to their co-stars and keep character journals and risk looking completely unhinged in pursuit of something real. Give me the people who publicly admit they stayed up memorizing Oscar acceptance speeches as kids instead of pretending success just fell into their laps. When Strong accepted his Emmy for Kendall Roy, he quoted a line from Kendall himself: "If we're not everything, we're nothing."
That's the magic of people who don't mind looking too hungry. They grasp that half-measures trap you in the middle, watching others either crash magnificently or touch greatness while you stay safely mediocre. Meanwhile our entire culture works overtime convincing us that visible ambition is embarrassing and naked desire is pathetic. I've spent too many years smirking from the sidelines when I should've been jumping in. The next time I catch myself cringing at someone's genuine enthusiasm, I'll remember that my reaction says more about my own fear than their courage.
The most electric performances, the most moving art, the most unforgettable anything comes from precisely that willingness to look completely undone by wanting. Maybe instead of mocking Jeremy Strong for caring too much, we should ask ourselves why we've settled for caring so little.
I’ll leave you all with this ♥️:
A final note for people with taste 🫦
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- Sophie x
I’m no Jeremy Strong in any industry, but I know how it feels like to get mocked for caring. I’ve attended speaking engagements where people have openly laughed in my face for saying that I deeply care about and love every chance to work in film education and criticism.
It’s either not worth it, or it’s too childish, but there’s just this reaction to any kind of passion or showing a vulnerability to the work. I don’t get it. Partially cause I’m autistic, but also because it doesn’t make sense.
I loved this essay.
The criticism of people who care reminds me of the people at school who used to describe things (films, books, music) they didn't understand as "pretentious" – which is literally missing the point of the word, i.e. that it involves pretense. What's so refreshing about Jeremy Strong is that he's actually therefore one of the least pretentious people in film today, because his devotion to his craft is earnest to the point of oddness. He's not pretending to love acting, to be driven, to care deeply about the quality of the films he is in.
To me, that's very cool. But it's also so unusual nowadays that people don't know how to react to him, and so they inevitably alight on their default response: slightly defensive piss-taking...
Incidentally, I think it's kinda fascinating that the two characters these two play in Succession have their respective approaches *to their father's business*. Both want to inherit it or at least play an important role within it – they both aspire to traditional success and recognition – but Kendall takes it deadly, humourlessly seriously, while Roman exploits the born-to-rule ease he's afforded in a boardroom context to hide his real insecurities. Great casting, in other words.