On being home alone with Macaulay Culkin

It isn’t entirely easy for Macaulay Culkin to revisit his role as Kevin McCallister in the iconic Hollywood movie Home Alone.

Turning 35 last month, Home Alone remains a defining moment in pop culture and in Culkin’s life. At just 10 years old, he became a global star with his charming, resourceful portrayal of a child left home alone during the holidays. The film grossed more than $700 million worldwide and became a seasonal classic.

Now a father, Culkin sees the film through a different lens. “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 said. “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.”

Although he has revisited Kevin in ads for Google, Uber Eats and a campaign called Home But Not Alone, Culkin remains cautious about a new movie. “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.”

Beyond nostalgia, Culkin has built a steady career in TV and music. He recently returned to the small screen for the second season of Fallout, an action-packed sci-fi drama. On his new character, he said: “He’s a different kind of Legionnaire. 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 was also impressed by the attention to detail on set. “It’s the costumes, it’s the set designs, it’s all that stuff,” he explains. “Those pieces of graffiti in the background that one in a thousand people are going to catch, this show is very meticulous about those kinds 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’.”

Culkin balances legacy and reinvention, proving that even decades after Kevin McCallister first outsmarted burglars, he’s still capable of surprising audiences — on and off screen.