Macaulay Culkin says his quality of life improved after he made the difficult decision to sever ties with his father.
The “Home Alone” star reflected on cutting Kit Culkin out of his life on Monday’s episode of the “SmartLess” podcast after being asked if he still speaks to his parents, who were his managers throughout his childhood.
“I had a pretty acrimonious relationship with my father, famously,” Macaulay, 45, said, adding, “As soon as I was able to kind of push him out, my quality of life on a day-to-day level definitely went up.”
Kit, 81, was the former child star’s manager in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Macaulay starred in hits like 1990’s “Home Alone” and 1991’s “My Girl.” Riding high in his career, Macaulay famously took a step back from acting at just 14 years old.
“I was done,” Macaulay recalled on the podcast episode. “I was like, I hope you all made your money, because there’s no more coming from me. I made my name, I made my mark, I made my fortune.”
Macaulay noted that he made enough money to “play video games all day long” and “do nothing” — confirming that he took home the “lion’s share” of the money from his projects.
However, his acting gigs stopped being fun.
“I wanted to take a break, and I said I was getting really taxed. I was not heard. That was something that really affected me, and affected my work and stuff like that,” he recalled.
“It was just like, ‘Oh, I’m on the hamster wheel and I can’t get off.’ Once I had some autonomy and some agency in my life, I grabbed it with both hands.”
Macaulay allowed himself to have a somewhat normal life during high school, saying he “fell in love, got drunk for the first time, things like that.”
“I was kind of just drifting around, and tried to figure out what I wanted out of life and so forth,” he explained, noting that acting was “a calling that found” [him]. “I didn’t find it. I wanted to explore that in a different way, on my terms.”
“I retire and then, if I find something I like, I unretire, do that, and I immediately retire afterwards,” he said. “Every gig is my last.”
Macaulay has sporadically appeared on TV shows and in films over the years. Most recently, he was a voice actor in “Zootopia 2,” which premiered in November, and had a cameo in Netflix’s “Running Point” this year.
In 2022, he starred in six episodes of “American Horror Story” and was also a voice actor in “Robot Chicken.”
When he’s not focused on acting, Macaulay is busy being a father to his two kids — Dakota, 4, and Carson, 3 — whom he shares with fiancée Brenda Song. He and the “Suite Life of Zack & Cody” alum, 37, got engaged in 2022.
Last year, Macaulay said he had a “complicated relationship” with Father’s Day.
In 2018, Macaulay said that he and Kit had a “sour” relationship even before “the fame stuff.”
“He was abusive, physically and mentally — I can show you all my scars if I wanted to,” he said of his dad in an interview with Marc Maron.
He also claimed that his dad was “jealous” of his Hollywood success, saying, “Everything that he tried to do in his life, like, I excelled at before I was 10 years old.”
Macaulay became the breadwinner for his poverty-stricken family when he was just a child.
His brother, Kieran Culkin, also has a bad relationship with their dad, telling the Hollywood Reporter in 2021 that Kit “wasn’t a good person.”
The “Succession” star, 43, did, however, praise their mom, Patricia Brentrup, before snubbing their dad.
“She’s just an absolutely wonderful woman who took on raising seven kids in a studio apartment, by herself,” Kieran said while attending the 2024 Emmys, adding, “There was a guy there — he didn’t do anything.”
