Macauley Culkin, who turned 46 on Aug. 26, became one of the biggest young actors of the 1990s after landing the role of Kevin McCallister in Home Alone as a 9-year-old. The film turned him into an international star almost overnight, and he followed it with a string of hit movies including My Girl in 1991 and The Good Son in 1993.
His rapid rise also came with enormous financial success. Culkin reportedly earned $110,000 for the first Home Alone before receiving a much larger paycheck for its sequel, with his acting income eventually growing into a trust fund worth around $50 million.
“I was making God-knows-how-much money, and Kit was making me sleep on the couch, just because he could,” said Culkin of his father, Kit Culkin, in a 2001 interview with New York magazine. “Just to let you know who’s in charge and just to let you know if he doesn’t want you to sleep in a bed, you’re not going to sleep in a bed.”
Bitter custody battle
Away from the cameras, Culkin’s home life was unraveling.
According to Culkin, now a father of two, his father had controlled every aspect of his career, overseeing his contracts and finances from the time he became famous.
“My father would hide newspapers from me so I wouldn’t read the stuff about him or find out how much I was making,” he told New York magazine of his dad, who he described as “abusive.”
Despite his massive earnings as a child, Culkin has said he did not learn the true extent of his fortune until his parents became locked in a custody battle in 1995, when it became clear his father had kept him completely in the dark about his own money.
Removed parents name from trust
According to Culkin, watching his motherstruggle financially during the dispute forced him to make a life-changing decision.
“Basically, I had millions and millions of dollars in the bank and my mother couldn’t pay the rent because she was spending all of her money on lawyers,” Culkin said. “We were about to get evicted from our apartment. The only way I could get access to that money was to take my father’s name off it, but I didn’t want to make it messy, so I figured I’d take both their names off.
Speaking with Esquire in 2020, the actor clarified: “I legally took my parents’ names off of my trust fund and found an executor, someone who would look over my finances, just in case anyone wanted to stick their f**king pinkie in the pie.”
The decision led to headlines suggesting Culkin had “divorced” his parents, a description he later said did not reflect what had actually happened.
“It’s always misconstrued, that I ‘emancipated’ myself from my parents. But the next thing you know, the story was that I divorced my parents. I just thought I was doing it cleanly – taking my father’s name off, taking my mom’s name off, so my opinion is unbiased. And when I did that, the whole thing kinda ended a lot faster,” he said.
‘I’m good, man’
Today, the former child star continues to work in the entertainment industry, although his career looks very different from the whirlwind years that made him one of Hollywood’s most recognizable young faces.
His recent projects include voicing Cattrick Lynxley in Zootropolis 2, playing Lacerta Legate in the second season of Fallout and making playful cameo appearances in the Netflix series Running Point, which stars Brenda Song, his partner and mother of his two kids.
“Look, I mean, it sucks. But, it could [have] been worse. I wasn’t working in a coal mine. I wasn’t a child soldier. My father was not sexually abusing me,” he said. “F*****-up things happen to kids all the time and they don’t come out the other end. I’ve got something to show for it, man. I mean, look at me: I got money, I got fame, I got a beautiful girlfriend and a beautiful house and beautiful animals.
It took me a long time to get to that place, and I had to have that conversation with myself and go, like, ‘Honestly, Mack? It’s not so bad.’ I want for nothing and need for even less. I’m good, man,” he added.