‘We haven’t talked about it’: Macaulay Culkin on Home Alone, fatherhood and THOSE reboot rumours
Macaulay Culkin explains how becoming a father changed how he views his classic movie Home Alone - and whether a remake is really happening.
It turned 35 years old last mont but Home Alone is very much still a part of Macaulay Culkin’s life.
The former child actor was just ten years old, although he’d already been acting for six years, when the Christmas comedy about a child left behind from a family holiday who has to defend his home from two burglars came out in 1990.
Thanks largely to Culkin’s breezy turn as the charming, resourceful, resilient Kevin McCallister, it made more than $700 million dollars at the box office, became an instant festive season favourite and made its lead actor a global star.
A less successful sequel (featuring a cameo from one Donald J. Trump) was released two years later, and while there have been times that Culkin’s relationship with the movie has been uneasy, he has since come to embrace its legacy, especially after becoming a father himself.
“It’s something that is different now because it’s taken on a different kind of flavour for me because I have kids on my own,” he says over Zoom, while promoting his role in the second season of Fallout.
“I know there’s a bunch of kids out there now that are just discovering it for the first time.
“I think it’s really neat. I like how it’s still alive and that people still remember and they still care about that flick after all of these years.”
In the last decade Culkin has revived the character in ads for Google and Uber Eats and only last month was in a campaign as Kevin for in-home care for seniors called Home But Not Alone.
And this week in New York he will wrap up a 35th anniversary tour featuring a screening of the film followed by a Q&A with fans old and new.
But those hoping for a belated third film in the series should temper their expectations. Not only is he wary of wearing out his welcome in a sequel, he says that even a remake would present some serious challenges for very modern reasons.
“We haven’t talked about revisiting it,” he says. “That’s above my pay grade, but at the same time, they keep on kind of trying to tap into that well and it’s kind of a moment in time where it happened.
“Because look, let’s say you try to remake that first movie, you’d have a really hard time doing it because of cell phones. Just boom, the fact that cellphones exist, would ruin the entire plot of that movie.
“So you’d have to really try to be clever and tap-dance your way around something like that. It’s definitely not something I would necessarily say is in the cards.”
While Home Alone made Culkin one of the biggest stars of the ‘90s, appearing in further hits including My Girl and Richie Rich as well as Michael Jackson’s video for Black And White, his childhood was marred by a difficult relationship with his father Kit.
Culkin earlier this year revealed that he had not spoken to the man he has called “a monster” and “a bad” man in decades and in the recent documentary John Candy: I Like Me, opened up on how the larger-than-life Canadian comedian had looked out for him and provided a paternal presence when they worked together on the 1989 comedy Uncle Buck.
While he retreated from acting in 1994 after Richie Rich and went back to school, Culkin has been working solidly on screen and in music for the last 25 years. In recent years he has appeared in acclaimed TV series The Righteous Gemstones and American Horror story and in 2023 was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame.
Culkin is about to return to the small screen as part of the eagerly anticipated second season of Fallout.
Although he says that he and his wife, actor and former child star Brenda Song, don’t have time to watch much TV, last year’s acclaimed, Emmy-nominated first season was one of the few shows that “we watched all the way from beginning to end”.
“I thought the tone, the vibe, the whole thing was a really cool and … she rolled over in bed halfway through the fourth episode and she goes, ‘You belong in this show’,” recalls Culkin.
“I said, ‘I know, right?’ And a of couple months later I got a call on the phone and a knock on my door or whatever it is and by the grace of God here I am talking about it to you.”
While the details of Culkin’s role in the action-sci-fi-drama are a closely guarded secret, he admits that his character is part of The Legion, a brutal faction inspired by the ancient Roman Empire that is fighting for supremacy in the irradiated, post-apocalyptic world where Fallout is set.
“He’s a different kind of Legionnaire,” Culkin says carefully, wary of dropping spoilers. “And you can tell right away.
“There’s a lot of these Roman-esque soldiers but a lot of them are wearing hockey gear or they’re in football pads with makeshift weapons and all that stuff. And you take a look and go ‘oh this guy’s different’. He’s clean, he’s well-coiffed, he’s more meticulous, more methodical. He’s smarter and sharper and has more aspirations than everyone else.”
Culkin says he was blown away by the sheer scale of the Fallout sets and the ambition of the multiple storylines. With some scenes set in underground vaults, others following the quasi-religious Brotherhood of Steel and still others tracking heroine Lucy (Ella Purnell) and the centuries-old Ghoul (Walton Goggins) as the traverse the barren wasteland, Culkin says he’s as curious as the viewers as to how they all knit together.
“You know there’s always going to be a convergence of some of these spheres,” he says. “But even I’m going to learn some of the scale of the show as I’m watching with all you guys.”
But having been on set himself, Culkin says that even more impressive than the scale of the show is the attention to detail and the Easter eggs left for the true fans of the video game franchise that has sold more than 60 million copies since the first game was released in 1997.
“It’s the costumes, it’s the set designs, it’s all that stuff,” Culkin says. “Those pieces of graffiti in the background that one in a thousand people are going to catch, this show is very meticulous about those kind of things.
“I got to be there physically on set looking around going, ‘Wow, they actually did that – and it’s going to be out of focus in the background’. I’m able to soak that when I’m right there boots on the ground. That tickled somebody – not just the person who created it, because they’re a fan clearly. But it’s going to catch the eye of a couple of people out there who will be going, ‘man, that’s so cool’.”
Fallout streams on Prime Video from December 17. Home Alone is streaming now on Disney+.
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Originally published as ‘We haven’t talked about it’: Macaulay Culkin on Home Alone, fatherhood and THOSE reboot rumours
