Kieran Culkin has admitted he was the "very naughty young actor" who got Mark Ruffalo high during an on-stage prank.
In an interview with The Guardian, the now 42-year-old Succession star recalled when he swapped out a fake prop joint for the real deal during an off-Broadway play he starred in alongside Ruffalo, 57. Culkin said he was "17 and stupid," and decided to pull the prank on his co-star during the opening night of The Moment When, something which he immediately regretted despite some of his co-stars enjoying the surprise marijuana.
"I’m like, 'I thought this was a good prank. I’m stupid. Oh my God, I’m so sorry.' But actually, they loved it," he shared. "Mark says, 'I haven’t smoked pot in 10 years; the second half’s going to be so much fun.' There was this other actor who had never smoked pot in her life. She goes, 'Is this what being high is? This is lovely.' And then Phyllis Newman comes in and goes, 'I haven’t smoked pot since the 1960s. Thank you, darling.'"
While his co-stars took the prank relatively well, the stage manager wasn't happy about Culkin's antics. "Then the stage manager comes stomping in and goes, 'I don’t care whose it is, or what happened, but Kieran, give me the joint,'" he said. "I sheepishly handed her the roach and she said, 'Ruin your life on your own time.'"
Ruffalo told the story in a 2012 episode of The Graham Norton Show, but he didn't identify Culkin as the culprit. "There was a play that I did that I had to... I smoked a joint in the first scene," Ruffalo explained at the time. "Of course, there was a very naughty young actor I was in the play with, who on the opening night with all the critics, he slipped a real joint onto the prop table." Ruffalo explained that when he realized that he was smoking a real joint, he noticed Culkin pointing and laughing at him while he was still on stage.
That wasn't the only time Culkin pulled the prank, or at least tried to. He appeared in a production of Kenneth Lonergan's This Is Our Youth in London with Colin Hanks a few years later and joked to his co-star about replacing a fake joint with a real one. When he told Hanks, he replied, "'Are you fucking kidding me? If you ever do something like that, I swear to God, I'm going to punch you in the face."
Culkin brought up the idea near the end of the play's run, when Hanks was more receptive to the idea. "He shrugged like he was saying, 'If you do, it might be fun,'" Culkin said. "So, one day I hand him the real pot on stage and I see him, like, react. It looked like he was excited. But then he got too excited and got nervous. And his hands started shaking so much that he couldn’t get the joint rolled, and when he tried to light it, it fell apart. Thankfully, we had a pre-rolled fake joint behind him, so we ended up with that."
Now 42, Culkin said he wouldn't try to pull any pranks like that now. "I'm 42 now, I know better," he said. "I'm not going to try and get anyone high on stage." In 2012, Ruffalo compared the experience to a nightmare and encouraged fellow actors not to smoke weed while working, even if he admitted, "I got the best reviews of my entire career."