Content Warning: This article contains discussion of abuse.
Actor Macaulay Culkin revealed that he hasn't spoken to his estranged father in over 30 years during Monday's episode of the Sibling Revelry podcast with fellow actors Oliver and Kate Hudson.
Culkin rose to stardom as a child actor, playing Kevin McCallister in the 1990 Christmas comedy Home Alone and its sequel, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York in 1992.
His father, Christopher "Kit" Culkin, had quit his job to manage his third eldest son's career in the '80s as he emerged onto the Hollywood scene.
Culkin has been open about being abused by his father in interviews, telling New York magazine in a startling 2001 interview that his father was “always abusive, but it didn’t get really, really, really bad until later on.”
In a 2018 appearance on the WTF Podcast with Marc Maron, he said of his father, “He was a bad man. He was abusive, physically and mentally—I can show you all my scars if I wanted to.”
He mentioned how his father would constantly book him on acting gigs despite begging for a break from the industry.
Culkin finally managed to step away from Hollywood at 14 during a custody battle amidst his dad's split from Culkin's mother, Patricia Brentrup, also a victim of abuse.
Now 44, Culkin opened up about his traumatic childhood with the Sibling Revelry co-hosts.
He touched on why he left Hollywood at the height of his career, saying:
“I was tired, man. I was so tired. And the thing is, I remember when I was probably about 11 or 12, I remember talking to my father."
"And I said: ‘I’m getting tired, I think I need a break,’ and he goes: ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ll look into it.’ And the next thing I know, I was in the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing."
"I was like: ‘Oh, I’m stuck. Now, I’m stuck.'”
He continued:
“When I turned 14, my dad and my mom were having a thing, they kind of split up, and I said: ‘Great, I quit, now he’s out of the picture, I quit. I hope you guys had a good time, I hope you guys all made as much money as you possibly could because there’s no more coming from me.'”
“And that was it. I started taking ownership of myself.”
Culkin shared that his family was financially strapped before becoming a child star, and when asked about his parents' reaction to stepping down from being the family breadwinner, Culkin said his parents were “were pretty well set” by that point and were “too busy fighting each other” to be affected by his decision to leave.
“Also, I had a certain amount of autonomy. Like: ‘You’re gonna do this movie,’ at that point, I go: ‘No, f**k you, what you gonna do?’” he said.
He continued:
“During the whole custody thing, I wanted nothing to do with my f**king father. He was just the worst, and the judge was like: ‘Well, you have to do visitations with him.’"
"I didn’t say this to the judge—I was a smartass, but I wasn’t that much of a smartass—but I told my lawyer: ‘I’m not doing that.’ He’s like: ‘Well, you’ll be in contempt of court,’ I go: ‘OK, how about I dare this judge to put me in jail for not wanting to visit [my] abusive father. Actually, I’m going to double down on that; I double dare him to arrest the most famous kid in the world…’"
"I never played that card, but that was the one time I kind of played that card.”
When Culkin was asked about how his relationship is with his dad now, the American Horror Story: Double Feature actor said:
“I haven’t spoken to him in what would be about 30-something years. Oh, he deserves it, too."
"He’s a man who had seven kids, and he has four grandkids, and none of them want anything to do with him."
"As a man myself, I would know that I f**ked up, I really must have done something wrong… I have more than an inkling that he does not feel that way."
"Like, we're wrong, and he's right—he's one of those kind of, like, narcissistic, crazy people.”
"He was a bad man," said Culkin, and recalled how he developed his survival mentality while enduring physical pain at the hands of his father.
He explained:
“I would take his whooping and stuff like that, but the whole time, I was sitting there going: ‘Oh, I'm going to win at the end. I just sit tight, I'll take the whoopings, but I’m going to outlast him; I’m going to win.'”
Culkin mentioned that Kit is supposedly still alive, and when one of his siblings attempted to reach out to him at one time, “it turned sour pretty fast again.”
He surmised that his father was especially resentful towards him because he was a struggling actor who found his child becoming an early entertainment industry success.
"Then, all of a sudden, he has this kid that didn’t look anything like him—I look a lot like my mother, I don’t look like him—and right off the bat, I instantly got the lead stuff in the ballet company, I instantly booked all these things, I think he resented me for that," he said, adding:
"I think he kind of hated me a little bit for that, so I think that’s why he was a little bit harsh with me.”
While all six of his siblings were physically abused at one time or another in the household growing up, Culkin said he "took a big brunt of it."
“A lot of the time, when I was on the road doing things, it was just me and him, so I was kind of locked in a room with a crazy person, he recalled.
"I really took the brunt of it for the family, but they got their licks, too; like I said, he was just a bad guy across the board.”
“He was a son of a b*tch; he was bad to his kids, he was bad to his wife, he was the worst person I’ve ever known in my entire life.”
“It super sucks, but I wouldn’t be the man, I wouldn’t be the father I am today if it wasn’t for my experience. At the end of the day, I was like: ‘I’m gonna win,’ and here I am,' " added Culkin.
Fan were happy to know that Culkin was able to come out on the other side of it.
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You can listen to Culkin's entire interview on the Sibling Revelry podcast below:
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