It’s that time of year again when movie fans will be rewatching Home Alone as one of the best loved Christmas films of all time.
Just last week, Kevin McCallister actor Macaulay Culkin received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
The 43-year-old (yes you read that age correctly) was joined by Catherine O’Hara who played his mother Kate McCallister in the first two Home Alone movies.
During the reunion, she confessed to a line of John Hughes dialogue in the film she found “horrific” to say to the 10-year-old boy.
The scene in question takes place at the beginning of the movie when Kevin is sent to sleep in the attic as punishment for falling out with his family the night before leaving for Paris.
His mother Kate tells Kevin she doesn’t want to see him “for the rest of the night”.
He replies: “I don’t want to see you again for the rest of my life, and I don’t want to see anybody else, either.”
O’Hara’s character tells him: “I hope you don’t mean that – you’d feel pretty sad if you woke up tomorrow morning and you didn’t have a family.” But he says: “No I wouldn’t.”
And it was the line after this that haunted the actress, as she explained during her speech at the ceremony on Hollywood Boulevard.
O’Hara shared: “I was supposed to say, ‘Then say it again – maybe it’ll happen.’ I can’t tell you how much that killed me – I could not wrap my head around saying something so horrific to this beautiful child… of course I was not yet a mother at the time and I had no idea the kind of things would come out of my own mouth with my own two sons.”
After praising Culkin for “surviving” his fame as a child star, she added: “I know you worked really hard, I know you did, but you made acting look like the most natural thing in the world to do. It was really as if we’d ambushed this real little boy named Kevin to make a movie and he just went along with it for the fun of it.”