Macaulay Culkin

• 1. Introduction

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  In December 2018, Macaulay Culkin asked the internet to help him pick a new legal name. He announced that he would become Macaulay Macaulay Culkin Culkin, and he opened a vote on his own website to choose the new middle name. Five candidates were on the ballot. The winner was Macaulay Culkin, so his middle name is now his own first and last name together. By April 2019 the legal change was complete. The joke suits a man who was born Macaulay Carson Culkin and became one of the most successful child actors of the 1990s. At fourteen, he stepped away from the work that made him famous. How did a boy from a cramped Manhattan apartment become a household face? What was waiting behind the fame, and why did he walk off the set? And what did he choose to do once nobody expected him to come back?

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• 2. Yorkville Childhood

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  Macaulay Culkin was born on the 26th of August 1980, in the borough of Manhattan in New York City. His parents named him after the British historian Thomas Babington Macaulay. He was the third of seven children. His father, Christopher, known as Kit, was a former stage actor. His mother, Patricia Brentrup, came from North Dakota. The two had met in 1974, when she was working as a road traffic controller in Sundance, Wyoming.

  His siblings were Shane, Dakota, Kieran, Quinn, Christian and Rory. Dakota lived from 1979 to 2008. He also had a paternal half-sister, Jennifer Adamson, who lived from 1970 to 2000, and his paternal aunt is the actress Bonnie Bedelia. His ancestry is German, Irish and Norwegian.

  In the Yorkville neighborhood of Manhattan, the family shared a small apartment and struggled with money. His mother worked as a telephone operator. His father worked as a sacristan at a local Catholic church. Culkin was raised Catholic, spent five years at St. Joseph's School of Yorkville, and then moved to the Professional Children's School.

  The household was not a safe one. Culkin has said that his father was violent toward him and the rest of the family, and he has called him the "worst person he's ever known". He traced the abuse to jealousy. In his words, "everything Kit tried to do in his life Macaulay excelled at before he was 10 years old". He has described a good relationship with his mother. In a 2025 interview, he said he and his father had not been in contact for more than thirty years.

  His parents never married, and they split up during his teens. His mother filed for custody. Culkin later took both parents to court to remove their names from his trust fund, which was reportedly worth between 15 and 20 million dollars, and he hired an executor. In 2006 he turned this history into a book, an experimental, semi-autobiographical novel called Junior.

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• 3. Home Alone Years

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  At age four, Culkin took the stage in Bach Babies, a production at the New York Philharmonic. He kept working in theater, television and film through the 1980s. In the television movie The Midnight Hour, released in 1985, he appeared uncredited as a Halloween trick-or-treater. His first credited screen role arrived in February 1988, in an episode of The Equalizer titled "Something Green". He played a kidnapping victim named Paul Gephardt.

  September 1988 brought his film debut in the drama Rocket Gibraltar, where he played Cy Blue Black. In 1989 he played Billy Livingstone in See You in the Morning, with Jeff Bridges, Alice Krige, Farrah Fawcett and Drew Barrymore. That same year he starred opposite John Candy in Uncle Buck, as Miles Russell.

  Then came Kevin McCallister. Home Alone, released in 1990, put Culkin in the lead of a Christmas comedy. It reunited him with John Hughes, who had written and directed Uncle Buck, and with Candy, who played a polka band member named Gus Polinski. Culkin earned a Golden Globe nomination and won an American Comedy Award and a Young Artist Award. Co-star Joe Pesci later told People, in 2022, that Culkin was "a really sweet kid and, even at his age, very professional".

  The offers piled up in 1991. Culkin starred in an animated Saturday morning series called Wish Kid and hosted Saturday Night Live. He also played Thomas J. Sennett in My Girl, alongside Anna Chlumsky. The pair were nominated at the MTV Movie Awards for Best On-Screen Duo and won Best Kiss.

  The money followed. For Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, released in 1992, Culkin was paid 4.5 million dollars, compared with 110,000 dollars for the first film. In 1993 he played the villainous Henry in The Good Son, which did only reasonably well but earned him an MTV Movie Award nomination for Best Villain. He was also a student at the School of American Ballet. In 1993 he played the title role in a filmed Nutcracker, staged by Peter Martins from the 1954 George Balanchine version for the New York City Ballet.

  He made three films in 1994: Getting Even with Dad, The Pagemaster and Richie Rich. After Richie Rich, he retired. Culkin had grown tired of acting and wanted what he called a "normal life", so he enrolled at a private high school in Manhattan. The break was not total. In 1998 he turned up in the music video for "Sunday" by the rock band Sonic Youth.

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• 4. Michael Jackson

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  Around the time of the first Home Alone, Culkin became friends with the pop singer Michael Jackson. In 1991, he starred in Jackson's music video for "Black or White". The friendship outlasted his childhood and drew him into the most difficult public moment of his adult life.

  In 2005, Jackson stood trial on charges of sexually abusing a child. Culkin testified that he had slept in the same bed as Jackson but had never been molested. He dismissed the allegations as "absolutely ridiculous". He attended Jackson's burial on the 3rd of September 2009, and he is the godfather of Jackson's children Paris, Prince and Michael Jr.

  He has defended Jackson ever since. In a 2020 interview with Esquire, he said: "I never saw anything; he never did anything."

  Other friendships came through work. Culkin is close with the actor Seth Green, who appeared with him in Party Monster, who directed him in Changeland, and who gave him voice work on the adult animated sitcom Robot Chicken.

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• 5. Return To Acting

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  In 2000, six years after his last film, Culkin went back to work in the play Madame Melville, staged in London's West End. In early 2003 he made a guest appearance on the NBC sitcom Will & Grace. He played the deceptively immature divorce lawyer of the character Karen Walker, and reviewers liked him.

  Later in 2003 came Party Monster, a role far from Kevin McCallister. Culkin played Michael Alig, a party promoter who was a drug user and a murderer. He followed it with Saved!, as a cynical, non-Christian student who uses a wheelchair, in a conservative Christian high school. The film had only modest success at the box office. Culkin still won good reviews, and critics saw in them a path to an adult career. Voice work followed, including appearances on Robot Chicken. In 2005, VH1 ranked him second on its list of the "100 Greatest Kid-Stars", behind Gary Coleman.

  Sex and Breakfast, a dark comedy written and directed by Miles Brandman, was his first film since Saved!. It follows a couple whose therapist suggests they try group sex, and it also starred Alexis Dziena, Kuno Becker and Eliza Dushku. Shooting took place in September 2006. The film opened in Los Angeles on the 30th of November 2007, and First Look Pictures released it on DVD on the 22nd of January 2008. Next came the thirteen-episode NBC series Kings, in which he played Andrew Cross.

  In 2009 Culkin appeared in a British commercial for Aviva Insurance, which was rebranding from Norwich Union. He stared into the camera and said, "Remember me." On the 17th of August 2009, he turned up on WWE Raw at the Scottrade Center in St. Louis, Missouri. Chavo Guerrero Jr. had just lost to Hornswoggle after being hit by a rigged paint can, the classic Home Alone gag. Culkin stepped into the doorway and said, "That's not funny."

  On the 7th of March 2010, he joined Matthew Broderick, Molly Ringwald, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, Anthony Michael Hall and Jon Cryer at the Oscars for a tribute to the late John Hughes.

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• 6. Pizza And Parody

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  In April 2011, Culkin appeared in The Wrong Ferarri, an experimental film by the musician Adam Green that was shot entirely on an iPhone. The same month he featured in the music video for "Stamp Your Name on It" by Jack Dishel, who performs as Only Son and is Green's former bandmate. Online, he posted a video in September 2012 explaining how he had turned his New York apartment into a painting workshop.

  In December 2013 a video of Culkin eating a cheese pizza went viral on YouTube. It parodied Andy Warhol eating a Burger King Whopper in Jørgen Leth's documentary 66 Scenes from America. The video promoted the debut of his New York-based, pizza-themed comedy rock band, the Pizza Underground, with Culkin as lead vocalist. Their tour began in Brooklyn on the 24th of January 2014.

  Not every night went well. In late May 2014, at Rock City in the United Kingdom, fans began booing and throwing pints of beer. Culkin stormed off stage in the middle of his kazoo solo. The band cancelled its remaining UK shows, although it said the cancellation had nothing to do with that night. On the 10th of July 2016, Culkin announced that the Pizza Underground was splitting up and that the next album would be its last.

  In 2016 he also appeared in Adam Green's Aladdin and in a television advertisement for Compare the Market. In January 2018 he launched Bunny Ears, a comedy website and podcast that mocked celebrity-owned sites such as Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop. He serves as its publisher and CEO. Since 2018 he has been a frequent guest on Red Letter Media, in Best of the Worst, re:View and Half in the Bag, and he plays a parody of himself on Angry Video Game Nerd.

  On the 19th of December 2018, a Google Assistant advertisement brought back Kevin McCallister after 28 years. It recreated scenes from the film, including the shaving, the jumping on the bed and the decorating of the Christmas tree. This time, Kevin asked an assistant to set reminders. The next year, Culkin starred in Seth Green's film Changeland, released on the 7th of June 2019.

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• 7. Private Life

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  On the 17th of September 2004, police in Oklahoma City arrested Culkin. They found 17.3 grams of marijuana and two controlled substances, 16.5 milligrams of alprazolam and 32 milligrams of clonazepam. He was briefly jailed and released on 4,000 dollars bail. Charged with misdemeanor drug offenses, he first pleaded not guilty. The proceedings ran from the 15th of October 2004 to the 9th of June 2005, and he later reversed the plea to guilty. He received three one-year suspended prison sentences and was ordered to pay 540 dollars in fees.

  He married the actress Rachel Miner in 1998, when both were eighteen. They separated in 2000 and divorced in 2002. From 2002 to 2010 he dated the actress Mila Kunis.

  His current partner is Brenda Song. The two met while making Changeland, and they began dating in 2017. Their first son was born in 2021, and a second son followed in 2022. Shortly after the first birth, remarks Culkin had made about Song on a 2018 episode of The Joe Rogan Experience resurfaced. Song is Hmong-Thai American. In the interview he joked about the shape of her eyes, their interracial relationship and how their future children might look. He argued that he had the right to make Asian jokes, and said he would "understand the struggle". Critics said the jokes stereotyped Asians.

  Culkin generally keeps his personal life private. He lives in the Toluca Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, in a house he bought in June 2025.

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• 8. Second Act

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  On his fortieth birthday, in August 2020, Culkin tweeted: "Hey guys, wanna feel old? I'm 40. You're welcome." The tweet became one of the most-liked of all time, peaking at number 9. A year later he joined the starring cast of the tenth season of American Horror Story, titled Double Feature, and critics praised his performance.

  In 2022 he played a minor part in two episodes of The Righteous Gemstones. He also took a supporting role in Kid Cudi's animated project Entergalactic. On the 1st of December 2023, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Two former co-stars spoke at the ceremony: Catherine O'Hara from Home Alone, and Natasha Lyonne from Party Monster.

  In 2025 he voiced Cattrick Lynxley in Zootopia 2, the second-highest-grossing animated film. He also joined the cast of the second season of Fallout, and has had a recurring role in the series.

  In a December 2025 episode of the SmartLess podcast, Culkin described how he approaches the work now. He treats every job as if it might be his last. If a project interests him, he "un-retires", and when it ends he retires again. His role in Fallout is the next place to watch him do it.

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