Why Macaulay Culkin compares his career to ‘The Shawshank Redemption’: “I’ve built a really nice prison for myself”
When Macaulay Culkin stepped out in New York City in 2012, clutching a Red Bull energy drink and looking particularly gaunt around the eyes, it sent the media into a feeding frenzy, not least because Culkin had been desperately trying to stay out of the spotlight.
The Home Alone child star, now 44, took time out of acting in his teens after a short career that involved being constantly hounded by the paparazzi, and swirling rumours about his alleged drug use. Other big media talking points were his legal emancipation from his parents, who had been trying to gain control of $17m fortune in their divorce, and sleepovers with Michael Jackson that led him to go to court as a defence witness in the singer’s trial.
Understandably, apart from a few forays back into film, the actor jumped ship, moving to France at one point and keeping a low profile, letting his brother Kieran Culkin take one for the team off the back of Succession, and more recently, A Real Pain. It was this spiralling period as a prepubescent teen and subsequent low profile as an adult that led Culkin, whose real name is Mack, to describe his early childhood career as The Shawshank Redemption.
Speaking to Esquire in 2020, in one of the actor’s first interviews in 20 years (apart from a highly regulated interview with The Guardian in 2016), Culkin got candid about his career and getting to a place where he could finally reaffirm himself on his terms. “I enjoy acting. I enjoy being on set,” he said. “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?”
Elaborating on the strange comparison, he added, “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.”
Stepping back into acting and the world of fame that comes with it was a tube of shit Culkin was not ready to crawl through again until recently. Instead, he’s spent his time regaining some of his lost youth. According to that interview with The Guardian in 2016, Culkin gave the impression he was doing what he wanted and wasn’t interested in working or being famous.
He made headlines when he formed a pizza-themed Velvet Underground cover band, replacing lyrics with cheese puns and then cancelling their European tour dates due to a “cheesemergency” after he and his bandmates were booed off the stage in Nottingham Rock City. Culkin also starred in a few off-the-cuff commercials, like the Compare the Market ad, in which he plays himself as an adult but is treated like the Home Alone version of himself by the meerkats. He wrote an experimental novel, Junior, and caricaturised himself in a YouTube web comedy, DRYVRS.
But despite his reservations, the actor has tentatively taken on more roles in recent years, most notably starring in his friend Seth Green’s 2019 film, Changeland, where he plays a half-drunk tour-boat operator in Thailand. Culkin also met his long-time partner, a fellow American child actress, Brenda Song, on the set of Changeland, and the couple now have a son together, so all in all, Culkin’s “plush prison” is moving further away from his Shawshank Redemption analogy and towards a slice of heaven.
