he
could vote for what Mack should change his middle name to. He even went on
The Tonight Show, and Jimmy Fallon cast his vote. The choices were:
Macaulay Culkin (which would make his legal name Macaulay Macaulay
Culkin Culkin);
Kieran (suggested by his brother Kieran);
TheMcRibIsBack (the McRib being back);
Publicity Stunt; and
Shark Week (which Mack has never watched).
The winner, with almost sixty-one thousand votes, was Macaulay Culkin.
Mack smiles his I’m-amusing-myself smile the whole time he goes on about it:
“I still haven’t officially done it. There’s a lot of hoops you gotta jump through.
I have a high-powered, high-priced attorney all over it, and he goes, ‘It’s not
as easy as you’d think.’ But yeah, no, it’s happening. This gag is like a year old.
I gotta do this.”
I ask if Kieran ever texted back about the Golden Globe nomination. They’re
pretty close—Mack flew out to New York to meet Kieran’s new baby last year.
Kieran is crushing it on Succession. “I think he did,” Mack says, thumbing his
iPhone screen. “I told him, ‘Fuck Winkler, you got this.’ ” (Henry Winkler was
nominated for his role on the series Barry.) “And Kieran said, ‘Actually, we’re
both gonna get fucked by that hot priest this year. Which sounds more fun
than it’ll actually be. But thanks.’ ” (That would be Andrew Scott, from Flea-
bag. Neither was right: Stellan Skarsgård won.)
The middle-name contest? Mack does stuff like that. Stuff that seems super
weird but to him is just fun and amusing. Like the time he joined a cover band
that rewrote Velvet Underground songs so that they were all about pizza, and
ended up touring with them for a year in 2014. Started as a gag. The Pizza Un-
derground, they were called.
What he doesn’t do is act in movies much anymore, but the movies he did
do—in particular that one movie—have allowed him the kind of life where he
can do these gags, can even go on The Tonight Show or Joe Rogan anytime hewants, but without the pressure of promoting something all the time. Be-
cause the promotion? The promotion just about killed him. “Doing junkets
and things—that stuff always drove me crazy,” he says.
Last year, he was brilliant as a half-drunk tour-boat operator in Thailand
in a wonderful film called Changeland that his buddy Seth Green made and
that Mack had to do zero press for. It was the first movie Green directed, and
he wrote it, too, a heartrending buddy dramedy about friends reconnect-
ing on a trip.
But Changeland was, like, his fourth movie in twenty years.
Don’t some actors make movies and just not do all the crap that goes along
with it? Couldn’t he do that?
He nods.
“No, it’s true. It’s just—I enjoy acting. I enjoy being on set,” he says. “I don’t
enjoy a lot of the other things that come around it. What’s a good analogy. The
Shawshank Redemption. The way he gets out of prison is to crawl through a tube
of shit, you know? It feels like to get to that kind of freedom, I’d have to crawl
through a tube of shit. And you know what? I’ve built a really nice prison for
myself. It’s soft. It’s sweet. It smells nice. You know? It’s plush.”
He drinks some wine.
“People assume that I’m crazy, or a kook, or damaged. Weird. Cracked. AndFrom there, he became the hardest-working human in show business—and
it wasn’t so bad at first. “I was enjoying it at that point,” he says, washing down
a garlicky shrimp with some wine. “I was a bit of an attention whore. ‘Hey, I’m
a kid, look at me!’ But I was not tugging on my mother’s or father’s sleeve say-
ing, ‘Mommy, Daddy, I want to be a thespian.’ I enjoyed it because I was good
at it and I knew it. I was at least sharp enough to understand good attention.”
No Culkin would truly understand the humongousness of Home Alone for
some time. Mack’s youngest sibling, his brother Rory, was born a year before
the movie came out. “It wasn’t until my classmates in the first grade were telling
me about my own brother that I realized, Oh, everyone knows him. Wait, is he
everyone’s brother? I don’t get it,” Rory says. “And I guess in a sense, he was.”
Still, the father started leveraging it immediately, making the decisions as
Mack became a money-making machine. Some turned out well: My Girl, Home
Alone 2: Lost in New York, The Good Son (a messed-up movie worth rewatch-
ing). But there was also Only the Lonely (not John Candy’s best), a TV cartoon
series that ran for one season, Getting Even with Dad (a forgettable Ted Danson
vehicle), The Pagemaster (a partly animated flop), and Richie Rich, in which
you can actually read on Mack’s bloodless face, normally so malleable and
expressive, how much he doesn’t want to be doing this.
“It started feeling like a chore. I started vocalizing that and not being heard:up until the last year or two, I haven’t really put myself out there at all. So I can
understand that. It’s also like, Okay, everybody, stop acting so freaking shocked
that I’m relatively well-adjusted. Look: I’m a pretty peerless person. If I was an
accountant, I could look left and right, and there’s other accountants sitting
next to me in the office. It’s not like that. It’s one of those things where, like,
the cliché that we’re all snowflakes? That we’re all unique? Well, you know
what?” Mack leans in real close, drops his voice, looks me dead in the eye, and
says, with a smile I haven’t seen since the last time I watched Home Alone and
Kevin McCallister smiled directly into the camera, “I actually am a snowflake.”THE MACAULAY CULKIN ORIGIN STORY USUALLY STARTS WITH THE BAD DAD.
Why even name him here? Bullying failed actor shoves his offspring into the
business using shame and threats—that was it. There were seven kids and two
parents crammed into a one-bedroom on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
He enrolled Mack in classical ballet and signed him up for the Ensemble Stu-
dio Theatre, a respected company.
With Mack, of course, the dad thought he had hit it big. At eight, Mack was
cast in a movie, Rocket Gibraltar, with Burt Lancaster and a bunch of prefame
New York theater actors, including Bill Pullman, Patricia Clarkson, and Kevin
Spacey, who was, like Mack, appearing in his first big movie. (Me: “I thought
Kevin Spacey was really funny in that movie.” Mack, loud and sarcastically:
“He’s hilarious now!”)
We’re talking about this at Carlitos, where dinner rolls along the way he is
used to: a plate of grilled blood sausage, a Mack favorite; plump green gnoc-
chi, the leftovers of which he will take home to the woman he calls “my lady.”
A year after Rocket Gibraltar, Mack got a role in the John Hughes comedy
Uncle Buck. In one scene, a woman arrives at the front door and he peers
through the mail slot. “That scene where I’m looking through the mail slot?
Hughes saw that and he got the idea: Kid defends house! And he wrote Home
Alone for me,” Mack says.HE STEALS SPOONS. HE IS GODFATHER TO PARIS
AND HE GOT HER IN ON IT, TOO. HE TELLS
TO TAKE SOMETHING
AND DON’T FORGET TO STICK
64 MARCH 2020