Was turning down Wes Anderson’s ‘Rushmore’ the biggest mistake of Macaulay Culkin’s career?
In February 1999, an oddball comedy was released about a manipulative scholarship student, the disillusioned local industrialist who takes him under his wing, and the beautiful school teacher whose affections they battle over.
The movie was called Rushmore, and it marked Wes Anderson’s cinematic debut, as well as Home Alone star Macaulay Culkin’s successful transition from child star to promising young adult actor. Now, if your brain fritzed while reading that last sentence, you’re paying attention.
Well done. Rushmore, of course, did not star Culkin as Max Fischer, the bespectacled, beret-wearing wannabe teen revolutionary. Instead, the role was played by Jason Schwartzman in his film debut, and he parlayed its success into an acclaimed career featuring roles in six other Anderson flicks, I Heart Huckabees, Funny People, Fargo, and The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.
So, why did I try to pull a fast one by making you think Culkin starred in Rushmore? Well, during a recent Hot Ones interview, the artist forever known as Kevin McCallister revealed that he was sent the Rushmore script during his eight-year hiatus from acting between 1995 and 2003. Unfortunately, even though he read a lot of the scripts sent his way during that period, Rushmore wasn’t one of them, and it languished in a drawer, unread, for years.
“There was a couple that slipped through,” Culkin admitted when asked about the scripts that got away. “I remember about two years later, kind of clearing out the house, throwing out the old scripts, and I saw the one that I didn’t read was Rushmore. I was like, ‘Ah dang. I probably could have done that one.'”
Culkin added that, having seen the film, he couldn’t really imagine anyone other than Schwartzman playing Fischer, but he also couldn’t help thinking, “Oh man, that would have been a ball and a biscuit, that one.”
Charmingly folksy turn of phrase aside, it’s clear that Culkin honestly believed Rushmore could have captured his imagination, had he actually, you know, paid it any attention. It’s not often that an actor singles out a project they didn’t get to make, after all, unless that project is one that truly sticks out to them.
So, with that in mind, it’s worth asking if turning down Rushmore was the biggest mistake of Culkin’s career. By 1999, he hadn’t appeared on the big screen since Richie Rich in ’94, and in those five years, he’d gone from being a 14-year-old who still looked young enough to play a ten-year-old into a young man of 19 whose sole work in front of a camera was starring in a Sonic Youth music video.
In truth, Culkin had been burned by the intensity of his fame as a child star and the effect it had on his family, especially his father. Before he started making millions of dollars, his family struggled financially, and perhaps the fear of it all going away led to his father, Kit, working Macaulay, and to a lesser extent, his brother Kieran, far too hard.
Macaulay has claimed his father was jealous of his success and even accused him of being physically and mentally abusive. It all led to a much-publicised legal battle between a rich child who didn’t want his family to control the $17million he’d earned, followed by, for all intents and purposes, retirement at 14. Culkin reportedly told his family, “I’m done, guys. Hope you all made your money because there is no more coming from me.”
This atmosphere doesn’t exactly sound conducive to fostering a love of acting in someone so young, and for a long time, Culkin wanted nothing to do with Hollywood. However, the pull of acting was too strong, and he returned in 2003 as a 22-year-old in Will & Grace and the indie movie Party Monster. These roles received some good write-ups, and he continued to act sporadically over the years in indie movies and shows like American Horror Story and The Righteous Gemstones.
True acclaim as a fully-fledged adult star never quite materialised, though, and these days, he mostly seems happy to star in minor roles that trade on his past as the most famous child actor in the world. Aside from that, he lives a fairly normal life with his wife, Changeland co-star Brenda Song, enjoys going to pro-wrestling shows with his brothers, and gets a kick out of doing weird things for his fans, such as legally changing his name to ‘Macaulay Macaulay Culkin Culkin’.
So, overall, Culkin seems very happy with how his life turned out. It’s also entirely possible that he never wanted to be a quote-unquote “serious” working actor as an adult, because he experienced enough of those pressures as a child, and held no desire to go back. However, to play devil’s advocate, who is to say that things couldn’t have been wildly different if he’d agreed to star in Rushmore? That eccentric, weird comedy sounds right up his alley, and it would have challenged him as an actor during a period where his disillusionment with the business had completely subsumed any love he had for the craft.
If Culkin had made Rushmore, he could have set himself up for a fascinating career not unlike the one Kieran has enjoyed. He made Igby Goes Down, an oddball indie comedy drama in the early ’00s, and kept on that path for years until Succession made him a superstar. Now, he’s an Oscar winner. Could that have been on the cards for Macauley, if only he’d read that darn script all those years ago?
