How Macaulay Culkin’s “first audition in eight years” ended in disaster
No matter what you thought when you were a precocious seven-year-old, being a child star requires a little more than having parents unselfish enough to drive you to auditions every day: just ask Macaulay Culkin, whose early brush with global fame was more of a curse than a blessing.
After landing the life-changing role of Kevin McCallister in the world’s greatest Christmas movie, Home Alone, Culkin shot to fame at the tender age of ten. He wasn’t one of those child stars who succeed in one film due to a complex web of unrepeatable circumstances but was an innately gifted performer. He proved his skills again and again throughout his childhood and early teens with films like My Girl and Richie Rich, but took an extended hiatus from the biz when he was 14 to pursue civilian life.
No one makes it out of Hollywood so easily, though, especially those who become absurdly famous before they reach double digits. Culkin might have stayed away from acting for nearly a decade, but he has returned sparingly over the years, if only to remind us that we are all a lot older than we think.
Most of these projects have been outside the mainstream, with a 2007 comedy about swingers called Sex and Breakfast, an Aviva commercial (fair play to Aviva for landing that one), and the free-wheeling, head-scratching experimental film The Wrong Ferrari from 2011. All of this has made it seem like Culkin was only interested in obscure projects, but that was not entirely true.
In an interview with Esquire in 2020, The Pizza Underground percussionist revealed that he had auditioned for a role in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood, but it hadn’t gone down according to plan. “It was a disaster,” he said, “I wouldn’t have hired me. I’m terrible at auditioning anyway, and this was my first audition in like eight years”. The question of what happened is probably the most obvious thought, but it’s also worth asking why Tarantino insisted on auditioning Kevin McCallister; after all, what more does he have to prove?
Hiring Culkin would have been yet another clever feat of meta-casting for the director, who sprinkled the supporting roster of this film about Hollywood nostalgia with Easter eggs. He stacked it with all the daughters of industry royalty, such as Margaret Qualley, Maya Hawke, Rumer Willis, and Harley Quinn Smith, alongside Zoë Bell, the iconic stuntwoman, in a cameo appearance and legends like Al Pacino and Bruce Dern cropping up in bit parts; hence, Culkin’s presence would have been both surprising and perfectly aligned with these other performers.
Unfortunately, the actor didn’t specify which role he’d tried out for, which means we can only speculate; however, it would have been fucked up in the most glorious way if the beloved child star-turned reclusive celebrity eccentric was cast as the director’s version of Charles Manson.
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