62 MARCH 2020In truth, he hasn’t done a photo shoot like this in fifteen years. Which is
not to say he hasn’t been a celebrity. Macaulay Culkin has been so famous for
so many years that it is pretty much the only life he knows or can remember.
But he was gone for so long. Or seemed gone. A kind of nether-celebrity.
What about the stories about Michael Jackson? The drugs—that photograph,
when he looked so skinny? Why did he stop making movies?
Is he weird? He’s weird, right?
Before the shot, when no one else is around, he says to me, quietly, “This is
not really my cup of tea. These are all lovely people, but the poking, the prod-
ding—honestly, it’s part of why I don’t do this anymore. Any of it.”
And yet here he is, and on the set, when it’s time to pose, he is golden. He
awaits instruction, a pillar amid swirling photographer’s assistants and help-
ers and a groomer and production people. He occasionally warbles along with
the radio, but otherwise he says little, stands where he is asked, politely obliges
when a different angle of the neck is requested. He positions and repositions
his body; says, “Okay” and “Sure” and “Like this?”
He is working.
His eyelids are heavy, same as when he was a kid. When he raises his eye-
brows, his eyes pop open and he looks amused. When his lids are low, he looks
either bored or hyperfocused—you can’t always tell with Mack, and that’s part
of what made him a joy to watch in the dozen movies he did before age four-
teen, and especially in Home Alone, the movie that ultimately left him very
much alone in the world.
The photographer asks him to lean against the wooden wall, and he does.
Then he rests his head against the wall, which makes him look contemplative,
but really he’s just posing, because these are the conventions of celebrity: the
pose, the hair spray, the fashion credits, the staring into the camera. It’s what
celebrities do to promote their next movie, their new song, their comeback.
The thing is, Macaulay Culkin isn’t promoting anything at all. What’s more,
he would apparently rather be home with his cats.
So what on earth is he doing here?“MAAAAACK!”
This is the beaming abuelo who co-owns Carlitos Gardel, an Argentine restau-
rant on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles where Mack has been eating a couple
times a month for fifteen years whenever he’s in town. The man embraces
Mack like he’s family come home for Sunday supper. His wife—she makes the
desserts—comes over for a kiss.
Mack orders a bottle of red wine, the one he likes. Waiters and attendants
and family members assure his comfort. A basket of warm bread appears; he
gets right into it, dunking a big crust into the Carlitos chimichurri sauce, tak-
ing a sip of wine—to Mack, this is all comfortable and easy, these people and
this food. The warm relief of the familiar.
Mouth half full, he’s talking about how he’s changing his middle name. It
started as a gag on the website he runs, BunnyEars.com, on which readersHE IS TAKING OFF HIS PANTS WHILE STANDING UP, TRYING NOT TO FALL OVER.
He’s got his ankle kind of balanced on the opposite knee, and he sometimes
loses his balance for a second, the way you and I do when we take off our
pants while standing up. He has to hop on one foot. Sometimes he lets out a
little whoop when he teeters on one foot, the way you and I might, especially
if six people were watching us take off our pants and we lost our balance.
So there he is in his underwear. Macaulay Culkin.
I don’t know, they were like baggy briefs, I guess. Tan.
He goes by Mack. “Hi, I’m Mack,” he had said four minutes earlier, before
I saw him in his underwear.
I’m not sure if I should look away, maybe. But it’s a photo shoot, so he has
to keep changing, and he doesn’t appear to care that there are six people he
doesn’t know watching him in his underwear. He’s making small talk with
the stylist. (“Where’d you grow up?” “Manhattan. Yeah, I’m a city kid.” “Oh,
yeah? Manhattan?” “Yep.”)
He sounds... normal?
He quickly re-pants, slips a T-shirt over his broad, taut, slightly elongated,
pinkish, not-hairy, almost-forty-year-old torso. He slides on a pair of sunglasses
with big rims tinted the color of a ripe peach.
He looks good. Healthy. Is that a surprise?
“Goin’ to get a little fresh air,” Mack says, smirking at his use of a cliché. The
smirk is a Macaulay Culkin thing: One end of his full mouth curls up to one side
in a way that makes him look like he knows something you don’t.
His publicist, a gentle woman who has been his publicist since he was ten
years old, two people who connected with each other and haven’t let go, gen-
tly hands him his pack of Parliaments and beat-up green drugstore lighter. His
fingernails are painted red, and the paint is scuffed. She is expressionless as
she hands him the cigarettes, or maybe she chooses not to express how much
it worries her every time he puts a cigarette between his lips.
Now he stands in the driveway of a former industrial building where the
photo shoot is happening. The smoke break? He checks his phone, to see if
his brother wrote back—his brother Kieran just got a Golden Globe nomina-
tion, and Mack texted him congratulations. A guy driving a truck rolls down
his window and asks for a cigarette, but Mack holds up his pack and crumples
it to show the guy it’s empty. Then he calls the restaurant, his regular place,
to tell them he’s coming in tomorrow night.
A smoke break.
Back inside the former industrial building, he changes outfits again. The
photographer and stylist have him getting into a bright red shirt and a dark
black suit and shoes the color of custard. His blond hair is cut high and tight,
showing off his ears, which are as you remember them.
“Yeah, this is waaayy better than being home wearing my pajamas,” he says
loudly as he buttons the shirt, smirking over at his publicist. “Oh, yeah. Why
would I want to be home in my bed right now? With my cats? And my lady?
That would be terrrrible.”