Macaulay Culkin has nothing good to say about his estranged father, Christopher “Kit” Culkin.
The “Home Alone” actor, 44, appeared on Kate and Oliver Hudson’s “Sibling Revelry” podcast Monday and opened up about the poor relationship he’s had with his dad since childhood.
“It’s one of my earliest memories of him was [thinking], ‘When I grew up, this is how I’m not gonna be with my kids,’” Macaulay said to the Hudson siblings, who are similarly estranged from their dad, Bill Hudson.
“Now that I have kids of my own, it’s like, you know, it kicks up some dust,” added the former child star, who shares sons Dakota, 3, and Carson, 2, with fiancée Brenda Song.
“I kinda go, you know, like, I can’t believe he was like that. He had all these lovely kids. It’s crazy,” Macaulay said.
Macaulay confirmed that he hasn’t spoken to his father in nearly 30 years.
“Oh, he deserves it too. Yeah. He’s a man who, he had seven kids, and now he has four grandkids,” Macaulay said. “Yeah. And, none of them want anything to do with him.”
Kit, who was a Broadway theater actor but now is out of the spotlight, had six other children with his ex-wife Patricia Brentrup: Shane, 49, Dakota (who died in 2008), Kieran, 42, Quinn, 40, Christian, 38, and Rory, 35. Kit also had a daughter, Jennifer Adamson, with ex Adeena VanWagoner. Jennifer died in 2000 at age 29 from a drug overdose.
Noting Kit’s estrangement from the family, Macaulay said he “has more than an inkling” that his father thinks he hasn’t done something wrong.
Macaulay went on to call Kit “narcissistic” and “abusive,” sharing how he “wanted nothing to do with my f—ing father” during Kit and Brentrup’s custody battle in the 1990s.
“Like, he was just the worst,” Macaulay said.
The “My Girl” star recalled that he refused to let his father visit him when he was still a minor.
“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, ‘Okay. 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,” Macaulay said.
Kit now lives a reclusive life away from his children. But in 2016, he told the Daily Mail in a rare statement about Macaulay, “I don’t consider him a son anymore.”
Macaulay’s parents were together from 1974 to 1995 but never married.
On the heels of Macaulay’s massive success with “Uncle Buck (1989), “Home Alone” (1990), “My Girl” (1991) and “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York” (1992), Kit managed his career. Macaulay only learned of his $50 million fortune during their custody battle.
“My father would hide newspapers from me so I wouldn’t read the stuff about him or find out how much I was making,” he told New York Magazine in 2021. “I had millions and millions of dollars in the bank and my mother couldn’t pay the rent because she was spending all of her money on lawyers. We were about to get evicted from our apartment.”
Despite rumors, Macaulay clarified to Esquire in 2020 that he never emancipated himself from his parents.
Kieran, for his part, has also been vocal about his childhood. The “Succession” star often thanks his mom in his acting acceptance speeches, most recently when he won best supporting actor for “A Real Pain” at the Oscars.
In 2024, he also gushed about her at the Golden Globes. “I have no idea how my mom did it — she raised in this basically studio apartment and I don’t know how she did it,” he said on stage.
Macaulay previously opened up about his and Kit’s estranged relationship in 2018 on Marc Maron’s podcast.
“He was a bad man. He was abusive, physically and mentally — I can show you all my scars if I wanted to,” Macaulay said at the time. “Everything he tried to do in life, I excelled at before I was 10 years old.”
In 2001, Kit’s late partner, Jeanette Krylowski, denied he abused any of his children, and claimed that Brentrup, 70, allegedly lied to keep her kids away from their dad.
“My analysis is [that] she was the only one not getting famous and she felt left behind,” Krylowski claimed. “The kids do what Mom tells them to, because through the years, Mom had said, ‘Your father doesn’t love you, your father doesn’t love you.’ “
Today, Macaulay is “in a really great place” with Song, and received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2023, where he had a reunion with his “Home Alone” mom Catherine O’Hara. As for more kids, he joked to the Hudsons, “we’ll see about that.”
“We always take the can down the road, you know, and so we should talk about it next year, that kind of thing, you know,” he said on Monday. “Obviously, right now, we’re actually in a spot where we actually have some really great stability. Both kids are in preschool right now. And we have a good routine. Brenda really starting to feel like herself again.”
