Macaulay Culkin says his quality of life has improved after making the difficult decision to sever ties with his father.
The “Home Alone” star reflected on cutting Kit Culkin out of her life on Monday’s episode of her podcast “Smartless” after being asked if she still speaks to her parents, who were her managers throughout her childhood.
Mr Macaulay, 45, said: “As is well known, I had a very difficult relationship with my father,” adding: “As soon as I was able to get rid of him, my quality of life on a day-to-day level definitely improved.”
Kitt, 81, was the former child star’s manager in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Macaulay starred in the hits Home Alone and My Girl. Macaulay, at the height of his career, famously took a step back from acting at just 14 years old.
“It’s over,” Macaulay reflected on the podcast episode. “I was hoping you guys would make money, because you’re not going to get any more from me. I made a name for myself, I made a name for myself, I made a fortune.”
Macaulay said he made enough money to “play video games all day” and “do nothing,” confirming that he took home “the majority” of the money he made from the project.
However, his acting job became less enjoyable.
“I wanted to take a break, but I told them I was owed a lot of tax, but they wouldn’t listen to me. It affected me a lot and affected my work and so on,” he recalled.
“It was just like, ‘Oh, I’m on a hamster wheel and I can’t get off.’ Once I had some autonomy and agency in my life, I grabbed it with both hands.”
Macaulay said he allowed himself to live a somewhat normal life during high school, “falling in love, getting drunk for the first time, things like that.”
“I was just drifting around, trying to figure out what I wanted out of life and all that,” he explained, noting that acting was a “found calling.” “I couldn’t find it. I wanted to explore it in a different way that suited me.”
Macaulay said he is still “technically” retired from acting, but takes on new roles from time to time.
“I’m retired, but when I find something I love, I’ll come out of retirement, do it, and then retire soon after,” he said. “Every gig is my last gig.”
Macaulay has appeared sporadically in TV shows and movies over the past few years. He most recently provided voice acting in Zootopia 2, which was released in November, and had a cameo appearance in Netflix’s Running Point this year.
In 2022, he starred in six episodes of American Horror Story and was a voice actor for Robot Chicken.
When he’s not focusing on acting, Macaulay is busy fathering two children, 4-year-old Dakota and 3-year-old Carson, with fiancée Brenda Song. He and the “Suite Life of Zack & Cody” alum, 37, got engaged in 2022.
Mr Macaulay said last year that he had a “complicated relationship” with Father’s Day.
In 2018, Macaulay said his relationship with Kitt was “rocky” even before they “became famous.”
“He was physically and emotionally abusive. If he wanted to, he would show me all my scars,” he said of his father in an interview with Marc Maron.
He also claimed that his father was “jealous” of his Hollywood success, saying, “Everything my father tried to do in my life, I excelled at before I was 10 years old.”
Macaulay became the breadwinner for his impoverished family from an early age.
Her older brother Kieran Culkin also had a bad relationship with their father, telling The Hollywood Reporter in 2021 that Kit was “not a good person.”
But the Succession star, 43, praised her mother, Patricia Brentrup, before disparaging her father.
Kieran attended the 2024 Emmy Awards and said, “She’s a really amazing woman who raised seven kids on her own in a studio apartment,” adding, “There was a guy there – he didn’t do anything.”
