The actor also shared his family's unusual sleeping situation.
Photo: Getty Images/Todd Williamson/NBC
If you've been binging Succession like we have, you've probably developed a soft spot for man-child Roman Roy (right behind cousin Greg, of course). He's a lot like a toddler—does what he wants, says what he wants, no inhibitions. But in real life, Kieran Culkin is a lot more measured, especially when it came to naming his second child, which took the actor a whopping seven weeks.
That's right, Kieran and his wife, Jazz Charton, deliberated over baby Wilder Wolf's name for almost two months, finally sharing the now-three-month-old's moniker for the first time on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. The actor explained why it took so long for them to land on the cute alliterative name, and we're sure many parents can relate to the struggle.
"My wife wanted Wolf. She was fighting hard for Wolf," Culkin explained. "We found [that] in the hospital the day that he was born, and we thought 'That's great.' But instead of pulling the trigger on it, let's torture ourselves for about seven weeks, disagreeing with names before we come around to the name that we picked. 'Cause, we didn't know if we were having a boy or a girl."
Luckily, the parents had some extra time before Wilder's arrival after Charton was put on an antibiotic drip. The doctor gave her the option to deliver immediately, before finishing the drip, but stay in the hospital a day longer, or somehow "hold the baby in for an hour and a half" and leave more quickly, which she did! What to do with this newfound time? Brainstorm names, of course.
"She's in bed, and we have a dry erase board, so we just go over every name that we thought of. And we were like 'Let's focus on girl names because we like these,'" said Culkin. "We narrowed it down to two girl names that we really liked, and we agreed it was going to be one of those two names if it's a girl and if it's a boy, we're screwed."
The pair welcomed their baby boy to the world on August 17, and "spent seven weeks arguing about names."
When asked why the couple didn't plan their baby's name in advance, he explained, "That would take some organization and some planning. That's not something that either of us do." And considering the fact that they already had their toddler daughter Kinsey Sioux running around, who can blame them?
Culkin also explained that he and Charton, who welcomed their first child back in 2019, have finally decided to move out of their one-bedroom New York City apartment—which has been the actor's abode since he moved out of his parents' home at 19. Culkin explained that building good sleep habits for their daughter meant giving her their bedroom (so worth it, if you ask us!). "So I just put a mattress on the floor, and we were kind of sleeping on that for the last year and a half [to] two years." Naturally, they've tired of their sleep arrangement.
Their decision to move came to a head after the Succession actor came home from work one day to find his seven-months-pregnant wife lying on their floor mattress.
"I look at this mess and see that she's pregnant. She's lying on a mattress on the floor, and I go, 'Honey, I'm so sorry for how we live.' And she goes, 'You know you're on a hit TV show, right? We don't have to live like this,'" he said. "But we're on our way up."
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