Kieran Culkin Misses His BAFTA Award Win Because He’s in New York with a ‘Family Member Who’s Quite Sick’

Kieran Culkin has picked up another award on his way to the Oscars.

Winning this year’s supporting actor British Academy Film Award prize for his work in A Real Pain, the actor, 42, missed the 78th annual BAFTAs ceremony on Sunday, Feb. 16 at London’s Royal Festival Hall due to a family illness.

Accepting the award on Culkin’s behalf at the David Tennant-hosted ceremony was Jesse Eisenberg, who directed, wrote and co-starred in the movie.

The filmmaker, who had previously won an award for best screenplay at the ceremony, said, “I know I just won an award, but this is also like the fifth award I’ve accepted on Kieran’s behalf… We have a similar life, but his is about 27% better than mine.”

Eisenberg added, “Kieran would love to be here. We spoke this morning. He’s in New York with a family member who’s quite sick, and he is so devoted as a family dad that he tried to drop out of my movie two weeks before we started shooting because he didn’t want to leave his kids.”

He continued to say of his costar, “He’s real, it’s beautiful and it’s admirable – his devotion to his family. He’s one of these lucky people who’s brilliantly talented, but who, for some random luck of the cosmos, has his priorities in order. So I’m so honored to accept this for him.”

In the running for BAFTA’s supporting film actor prize this year were Yura Borisov for Anora, Clarence Maclin for Sing Sing, Edward Norton for A Complete Unknown, Guy Pearce for The Brutalist and Jeremy Strong for The Apprentice. All except Maclin are also nominated in the supporting actor category at the Academy Awards, to be held March 2.

Culkin’s win follows a streak that began with a win at this year’s Golden Globes and extended to the Feb. 7 Critics Choice Awards. He missed the latter due to rehearsing the revival of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, in which he’ll star with Bob Odenkirk, Michael McKean and Bill Burr. The production opens March 31 at NYC’s Palace Theatre.

In A Real Pain, Culkin and Eisenberg (also BAFTA-nominated for original screenplay) play cousins reconnecting on a tour through Poland to honor their family’s roots after their grandmother’s death.

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First-time BAFTA nominee Borisov, 32, a classically trained Moscow-born actor, plays henchman Igor in writer-director Sean Baker’s Anora. The indie filmmaker wrote the role for Borisov after seeing him in 2021’s award-winning Cannes Film Festival entry Compartment No. 6.

Maclin, 58, has earned critical praise for his supporting performance — as a version of himself — in Sing Sing. The A24 drama starring Colman Domingo recreates a real-life theater production from Rehabilitation Through the Arts that took place at New York state’s Sing Sing Correctional Facility. The formerly incarcerated Maclin, an alum of the program, counts among his accolades his first BAFTA and Oscar nods as one of the movie’s adapted screenplay writers.

Nominated by BAFTA three times — the first back in 1997 for Primal Fear — Norton, 55, plays the late singer-songwriter Pete Seeger in A Complete Unknown. From writer-director James Mangold, the biopic stars Norton’s fellow BAFTA and Oscar honorees Timothée Chalamet as 1960s-era Bob Dylan and Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez.

Pearce, 57, plays wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren in writer-director Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist. The film, earning the Australian star his first BAFTA recognition, stars Adrien Brody as László Tóth, a Hungarian-born Jewish architect who emigrates to the U.S. and begins working for Van Buren.

Culkin’s Succession costar Strong, 46, made the BAFTAs’ nominations list for the first time for his supporting performance in director Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice. He earned critical praise for portraying notorious attorney Roy Cohn, mentor to a young Donald Trump (played by fellow BAFTA and Oscar nominee Sebastian Stan).

See PEOPLE’s full coverage of the 77th British Academy Film Awards, airing on BBC One in the UK and BritBox in North America.