Macaulay Culkin Opens Up About His Past — and the Bright Future He’s Built for His Family

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Macaulay Culkin didn’t hold back when asked about his fraught relationship with his father, Kit Culkin. On Oliver and Kate Hudson’s Sibling Revelry podcast, the 44-year-old recalled physical abuse during his childhood, even as he earned millions in films like 1990’s Home Alone. “I would take his whoopings and stuff like that,” Mac said. “But the whole time I was sitting there thinking, ‘Oh, I’m gonna win in the end.’” His father, he added, was “a bad man.”

The elder Culkin was the perfect nightmare of a stage father — both pushing his son to perform and punishing him for his success. “The thing is, he had a certain amount of resentment towards me, I think is what it was,” the Uncle Buck star mused. “It’s ’cause he wanted to be an actor.” Now a dad himself, Macaulay said he knew from a young age that he would not repeat that pattern. “One of my earliest memories of him was, ‘When I grow up, this is how I’m not going to be with my kids,’” he revealed. “And now that I got kids of my own, it makes me even more — it kicks up some dust that I kinda go, ‘I can’t believe he was like that.’”

TALENTED FAMILY

Macaulay is the eldest of Kit and Patricia Culkin’s seven children, alongside Kieran, Rory, Shane, Christian, Quinn, and Dakota, who was struck and killed by a car in 2008. While all the Culkin siblings have dabbled in the entertainment industry, only Macaulay and Kieran — who recently won an Oscar for A Real Pain — have found lasting success. Finances were tight when the kids were young. Kit worked as a taxi driver and for a church, and the kids slept in bunk beds in a tiny NYC apartment. “It was just a hallway, and there were no separating doors, except for the bathroom, which didn’t have a lock,” Kieran said in 2018. “They just kept bringing babies home to this little space.”

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By 1995, Macaulay was the most recognizable child star in the world but had no idea that he had earned some $50 million — Kit, who received a management commission of 15 percent, kept him in the dark. Macaulay said Kit’s abuse stemmed from jealousy over his success, fed by his own failure at building a career on the stage. “I instantly booked all these things… I think he hated me a little bit for that,” he noted. An ugly custody battle after his parents split spurred Mac to take control of his life and money. He went to court to remove his parents from his trust fund and appointed an executor instead. He then risked being called in contempt of court for refusing visitation with his dad. “I go, ‘OK, how about this, I dare the judge to put me in jail for not wanting to visit [my] abusive father.’” He hasn’t been in touch with Kit since. “I haven’t spoken to him in, what would it be, about thirtysomething years?” he said on the podcast. “He deserves it, too. He’s a man who — he has seven kids, and now he has four grandkids, and none of them want anything to do with him.”

A BETTER DAD

The Party Monster vet considers himself semiretired from acting and a full-time, present father to sons Dakota (named after his late sister), 4, and Carson, 2. After a brief marriage at 18 to Rachel Miner, he met Brenda Song on the set of the 2017 film Changeland. Also a former child star, the alum of Disney’s The Suite Life of Zack and Cody was shocked by gaps in her fiancé’s life experience. “I always say Mac is a very unique human,” the Running Point actress, 37, told Jennifer Hudson on her talk show. “He still doesn’t know how to drive! I took him out to drive in our neighborhood. I was terrified, let me tell you. This 44-year-old man driving for the first time? I gotta hire someone to do that.” She added that Macaulay “lived and grew up in hotels. He had just never really done laundry. I’ve been doing laundry since I was 10, helping my mom.”

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Despite his traumatic childhood, Mac feels he has indeed won, as he predicted. “He realizes how wrong his own father was for treating him the way he did,” a source tells Star. He is resigned that Kit will never understand the pain he caused. “As a man myself, I would know that I f***ed up. I must have done something wrong,” he said. “I have more than an inkling that he does not feel that way….He’s one of those narcissistic crazy people. Me and him were always butting heads. Like I said, he was a bad man.”