Ethan Cutkosky gets room to grow in ‘Shameless’

Ethan Cutkosky stood in front of a large microphone at a Near North Side recording studio recently wearing the teenage-boy uniform of a baggy hoodie, jeans and sneakers while the screen in front of him played back a scene from Showtime’s “Shameless.” On the show, Ethan plays Carl, a 12-year-old delinquent and the second youngest child in the destitute, dysfunctional, yet devoted Gallagher brood.

The scene showed Carl and Bonnie, a new character Carl’s age, running down an alleyway and stopping behind a garbage bin. They’ve just robbed a convenience store — yes, robbed — and their adrenaline is running high. Then, in painfully slow motion, Bonnie goes in for a kiss, the first for Carl.

“They had to put that in slow motion,” 14-year-old Ethan deadpanned. A few minutes later, two lines worth of dialogue work done, Ethan, an eighth-grader at St. Charles’ Thompson Middle School, swore up and down the kissing scene wasn’t anything special.

“It’s like any other scene,” he said nonchalantly. “It’s just that there’s a new person on set.”

With the breasts and buttocks that abound in “Shameless,” a kiss holds no shock value, but its emotional weight for Carl is more than the greatest bodybuilder can bench. Ethan plays it pitch perfect, cool and calm with a slight smile before the scene cuts away to let the audience know that some part of Carl was affected — even if Ethan wasn’t.

Showtime’s “Shameless” follows the Gallaghers, a hardscrabble family living on Chicago’s South Side. William H. Macy plays Frank, the family’s alcoholic, drug-addicted patriarch, while the talented Emmy Rossum portrays Fiona, the 23-year-old de facto family leader who shoulders most of the household responsibilities. The other five Gallagher children are well explored this season, too, including Ethan’s Carl, who has been featured more this year than any other.

The Season 4 finale will air Sunday, and Carl will factor in the episode heavily as his relationship with Bonnie blooms and he faces his father with a (slightly) more grown up perspective on life and family.

Carl’s increased airtime is a direct result of Ethan’s blossoming talent, said Mark Mylod, an executive producer on “Shameless.”

“When you look at Season 1, the role of Carl was to occasionally say something slightly shocking, but we certainly would never dream of actually putting any kind of narrative on him or giving him any kind of story strand,” he said. This season “we needed Ethan’s character to pull a lot more dramatic weight, and Ethan stepped up to the plate wonderfully and continues to impress us all both as a young man and as an actor.”

Ethan began modeling in print ads and commercials at 4 years old, and landed his first film role at 7 in “Fred Claus.”

As a child, Ethan was a high-energy, active kid, said his mother, Yvonne Cutkosky, a former teacher. Her husband and Ethan’s father, David Cutkosky, a computer software engineer, was often away for work during the week, and she thought traveling to and from acting gigs would be a good way to spend time with Ethan, she said.

Dawn Gray, Ethan’s agent, signed him about 10 years ago and remembers him having an innate gift for acting. “He was very natural, which a lot of kids aren’t,” Gray said. “He was really grounded as an actor and able to play a wide range of things. He was very in touch with doing tough material too.”

At 8, Ethan was cast as Barto, the undead boy in David S. Goyer’s horror film, “The Unborn.” A year later, Gray sent in Ethan’s audition tape for Showtime’s “Shameless.”

For Mylod, the choice to cast Ethan was simple: “He had a fantastic look. He looked like he was slightly stoned, and we thought, oh, the kid will never have to do any acting, and he’s got this great face.”

“He turned out to be a brilliant actor, which was a bonus,” he added.

Indeed, Ethan stretched his emotional performance this season, pairing his character’s trademark brashness with a deep, unwavering love for his father. Carl spends most of the season scheming to get his dying dad a liver and helping him find new ways to get high.

Carl “doesn’t know that he is being used,” Ethan said. “He’s growing up, but he also still has that little-kid mentality of ‘I will help daddy.'”

In person, Ethan is fairly reserved and is as loquacious as many 14-year-old boys, which is to say, not at all.

“He was very shy and respectful and quiet when I met him,” said Rossum. “I thought, oh, that is an interesting choice to play Carl, who is so kind of deliciously evil and a little tyrant. … Now, I see that Ethan always had a bit of a devilish instinct inside him.”

Over the years, Carl has been portrayed as a bully and a bit of a psycho, killing stray animals and mutilating toys. During Season 2, he attempted cooking meth with his grandmother and, in Season 3, he robbed his former foster parents’ home. This season, Carl has dealt with puberty and his evolving sexuality.

Ethan “has been fantastically game and fantastically brazen in embracing all of that,” Mylod said.

David and Yvonne Cutkosky said they had conversations with Ethan about the subject matter of certain episodes, and he only recently became allowed to watch episodes in their entirety.

“By the time I was able to watch it, I already knew about all that stuff,” Ethan said. “Half that stuff is probably going on in my school.”

Emma Kenney, who plays Carl’s sister Debbie, is Ethan’s best friend on set. She’s 14 and is also used to the adult material that marks “Shameless.”

“We don’t really talk about what happens on the show as much as we talk about normal teenage things,” she said. “I feel like we talk about it sometimes because it can be a little uncomfortable, but we’ve also grown up with the show and with each other.”

“Grounded” is the description cast members come up with when they talk about Ethan. He couldn’t be further from the archetypal stage kid. He waffles between “no” and “maybe” when asked about his future in acting.

“I don’t see myself as an actor,” Ethan said. “I see myself as someone who goes to work and then comes back and hangs out with his friends. … I still want to come home and be that regular kid.”

The show shoots in LA from July to mid-November, including a couple weeks in Chicago, and Ethan goes to “set school” when he’s filming. Next year, he will start high school at St. Charles East, and he spoke with Mylod last year about being able to begin the next school year with his classmates.

“It’s going to be a whole new experience,” he said, “and I want to be there for the first part.”

Mylod said production will do their best to accommodate his request. “He wants to have a balanced life,” Mylod said. “He doesn’t want to be the kid that only dreams of his movie career. … He is a good, grounded Chicago kid who wants that whole high school experience, and hats off to him for that.”

In February, Showtime announced that “Shameless” would return for a fifth season. The show’s fourth season has averaged 5.7 million weekly viewers and looks to be the highest-rated season yet, according to a Showtime statement.

The writers got back into the writing room about a month ago, Mylod said, and are throwing around ideas — “from the absurd to the semi-tragic” — for Season 5.

“One thing that can be said is that (Carl) will continue to evolve,” Mylod said. “He will continue to get more emotional and comedic weight, and that’s directly because of Ethan’s incredible talent.”

cocrowder@tribune.com | Twitter: @courtneycare

“Shameless”

8 p.m. Sunday, Showtime