Every millennial who watched My Girl as a kid likely still feels traumatized by the death scene in the 1991 film – and it turns out even just filming it was terrifying.
Macauley Culkin, who played 10-year-old Thomas J in the family classic, was stung to death by bees in a devastating twist, and as the actor recently revealed on the On Film … with Kevin McCarthy podcast, he was horrified to learn they’d be using the real deal on set.
“I was working with the bees,” Culkin, 45, explained.
“The way they did that, they wouldn’t do that today. They put this stuff on my fingertips that smells like the queen bee so [the bees] were actually attracted to my hands and I wasn’t a threat.
“They actually released thousands of bees on me, imagine that! I’m not joking, those are real bees. That would not fly today.
“They just told me to wave my hands in front of my face so the bees can get in front of my face and it looks good for the camera.”
Culkin added that he was warned to get away from the insects as fast as possible after each take.
“As soon as they yelled ‘cut’ I had to soap my hands in hot water and then dart into the woods,” he said.
“The bee handler gave me a piece of advice, he said, ‘human beings run faster than bees fly’. I was like, ‘but I’m 10. How fast do you think I am?’
“We did four takes. I didn’t get stung. I got a stinger in my neck, it didn’t sting me, my neck went into the stinger. It didn’t break off.”
Culkin shot to fame in 1990 as the star of Christmas classic Home Alone, in which he played Kevin McCallister, and went on to become a household name as a child star.
During an episode of the Sibling Revelry podcast earlier this year, he revealed why, despite all his success, he’d decided to walk away from Hollywood at a young age.
“Why’d you quit [acting]?” host Oliver Hudson asked him, with Culkin bluntly responding: “I was tired.”
“I remember talking to my father and I said, ‘I’m getting tired. I think I need a break’,” he said, adding that he’d “felt trapped” when his father kept pushing him.
According to Culkin, it was only when his parents split up that he felt he could actually quit.
The former child star hasn’t spoken to his father, Christopher “Kit” Culkin, in more than three decades.
“Oh, he deserves it too. Yeah. He’s a man who … had seven kids, and now he has four grandkids. Yeah. And, none of them want anything to do with him.”
Culkin claimed that his father was “abusive” and “narcissistic”, but that after his parents’ break-up, a judge had ordered the teenager to have “visits” with him.
“I wanted nothing to do with my f***ing father. Like, he was just the worst,” he said.
“I told my lawyer, I said, ‘Yeah, I’m not doing that.’ He said, ‘Well, you know, you’ll be in contempt of court and this and that.’ I go, ‘OK. Well, how about this? I dare the judge to put me in jail for not wanting to visit [my] abusive father. I actually, I’m gonna double down on that. I double dare him to arrest the most famous kid in the world’.”
