65 MARCH 2020He stamps out his cigarette, smiles, and says, “He’s a shitty guy, don’t get
me wrong.” Then he half stands, and motions with his thumb to go back in-
side. Back to the warm and familiar womb of Carlitos.LAST NIGHT AFTER THE PHOTO SHOOT, AT 3:00 A.M., MACK ORDERED EGGS
and bacon on Postmates, plus banana pancakes for his girlfriend, Brenda
Song, for when she woke up and he was still sleeping.
“I feed my lady,” he says.
She feeds him, too. When he did wake up, around 10:30, he ate a big hunk
of garlic rosemary bread she had made. “As fresh as fuck” it was.
Brenda has acted steadily for twenty-five years in everything from The Suite
Life of Zack & Cody to Scandal to Dollface, the recent Hulu comedy in which she
stars. Last year, she starred in the movie Secret Obsession, which was streamed
by 40 million viewers, making it one of the top ten most-watched Netflix orig-
inals. She also costarred in Changeland, which is how they got together. (“I
didn’t see that one coming,” says Green, who cast them.)
They have two cats—Apples and Dude—and a fish named Cinnamon. (“I
tend to name all the animals as if I was a five-year-old,” Mack says.) They
have a Shiba Inu, Panda. And they have a bird, a blue-headed pionus, a
relatively quiet species of parrot, that was named Nacho when Andyculkin net worth,” as many people apparently do, one of the top results is a
Bunny Ears story titled “Why Macaulay Culkin Isn’t Concerned About His Net
Worth.” (It’s about a butterfly net.)
Other Bunny Ears headlines: “Deep Breathing Exercises for When Your
Home Is Getting Robbed Right Now,” “Macaulay Culkin Ranks His Favorite
Macaulay Culkin Movies,” and “Romantic Mixtape Songs That Say ‘I Wanna
Do Butt Stuff.’ ”
Mack has recorded about a hundred episodes of his podcast. (“I wanted to
start a podcast, I guess? I don’t know, everyone’s doing it, but it’s not even that—
if anything, that makes me not want to do it. Yeah, but why the hell not? Let
me talk. I’m good at talking.”) It’s an extraordinary trove of Macaulay Culkin.
For a while in season 1, there was a recurring joke that when he introduced
himself at the top of each episode, he never said his real name but instead
made fun of the way people always screw it up (“Hi, everyone, this is Makalay
McClucklin”... “Hey, it’s Mulcahy Cluckster”... “I’m McClargy Conklin”). Nor
did he ever mention his most famous movie, instead citing The Pagemaster as
his claim to fame (“I’m former Pagemaster Makalaka Cuckler”).
Or he might be introduced as “the kid from Home Alone 3,” which he was not in.
So there’s that, the podcast. Otherwise, Mack waters the plants in the back-
yard and feeds all the animals. He paints. He writes ideas in notebooks piled high.I was saying, ‘I wanna go to school—I haven’t done a full year of school since
first grade,’ ” he says.
The truth was, everyone knew Macaulay Culkin, but Macaulay Culkin felt
like he didn’t know anyone.
Mack’s parents were never legally married, so when they split up in his mid-
teens, it wasn’t a divorce. A custody fight over the children dragged on for two
years. Also at stake was Mack’s trust fund—his earnings were reported to be
$15 million to $20 million. “We didn’t want to go with my father,” Mack says.
“It’s always misconstrued, that I ‘emancipated’ myself from my parents. 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
fucking pinkie in the pie. But the next thing you know, the story was that I di-
vorced 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.”
Through all of this, he eats—the gnocchi, the shrimp, and the blood sausage have
been decimated. Mack dabs his lips, stands, as if getting up from his own kitchen
table, and walks slowly out the front door. On the sidewalk: a glass two-top,
with a chunky glass ashtray on it, and two chairs. Fresh air.
He sits, lights up.
“Look, I mean, it sucks,” he says, puffing at the traffic on Melrose. Then he
turns, elbows on the table, both hands up by his head. “But: It coulda been
worse, you know? I wasn’t working in a coal mine. I wasn’t a child soldier. My
father was not sexually abusing me. Certain fucked-up things happened, but
fucked-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 ani-
mals. It took me a long time to get to that place, and I had to have that conver-
sation with myself and go, like, Honestly, Mack? It’s not so bad. I want for noth-
ing and need for even less. I’m good, man.”Richter had it for ten years but that Mack calls Macho.
He’s pushing forty—he’s thirty-nine until August—and he’s feeling it in his back,
among other places. (“I got an ulcer or two I gotta deal with,” he says. “I don’t
poop like I used to. My body’s like, Oh, is this what the beginnings of dying feel
like?”) He and Brenda are trying to have a baby. “We practice a lot,” he says, again
with the smirk—he knows he’s using another cliché, and he thinks that’s funny.
“We’re figuring it out, making the timing work. Because nothing turns you on
more than when your lady comes into the room and says, ‘Honey, I’m ovulating.’ ”
Sometimes, late at night, he plays video games—“when I’m stressed, or just
for fun. I’m regressing in my video-game playing. Now I’m literally back to
playing WrestleMania 2000. Gimme another week and I’ll be playing Pong
on an Atari 2600.” And he watches YouTube. He loves The Venture Bros., the
animated series on Adult Swim, and Nathan for Yo u , the satire of an Apprentice-
type reality show that’s the ball and the biscuit.
Mack has certain phrases he says. Like “the ball and the biscuit.” Lizzo is the
ball and the biscuit. The movie Saved!—a satire about a Christian high school,
and “the first time I really did a gig where I was surrounded by people my own
age, if you think about it”—was the ball and the biscuit.
Mack also spends about three days a week on Bunny Ears, which he started
in late 2017. It now employs five full-time staffers as well as twenty-five regu-
lar freelancers. They create daily content, plus a weekly podcast, merchan-
dise, and a video channel. He presides over editorial meetings, green-lighting
ideas. He crafts headlines for stories. It’s fun and amusing. He cracks himself
up. His writers crack him up. He writes about professional wrestling, one of
his favorite pastimes. He looks at the finances, which don’t always add up—
he is funding the thing, after all.
He has described Bunny Ears as a cross between Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s
new-agey wellness company, and The Onion, the humor website. It makes fun
of self-help, and it also makes fun of the Internet itself, with headlines overtly
designed to get traffic from people’s search terms. If you Google “macaulayJACKSON, MICHAEL’S DAUGHTER,
HER, “DON’T FORGET TO BE SILLY, DON’T FORGET
AWAY F ROM THIS WHOLE EXPERIENCE,
SOMETHING UP YOUR SLEEVE.”