Back in December, filmmaker Jack Dishel posted his first video on YouTube. It was a short independent film in which Macaulay Culkin reprised his Home Alone character, Kevin McCallister. But that character, after being abandoned by his family and terrorized by two psycho criminals, grew up to be kind of a sadist. The video has since been viewed more than 23 million times.
Beyond that brief appearance in a five-minute film, Culkin's life has been the stuff of rumors, cultivated by the public's lasting fascination in the child star. Is he on drugs? Is he ill? Is he acting? Why is he in a pizza-themed Velvet Underground cover band? The questions are plenty, and largely thanks to his avoidance of the spotlight. Culkin hasn't done an interview in 10 years.
But, what's he been doing this whole time?
Despite what appears in the tabloids—still, really—Culkin hasn't been doing a whole lot, according to his first interview in a decade. Though the conversation was strictly monitored by Culkin's publicist, a new article from The Guardian paints the child actor as a pretty chilled adult, who more or less does what the hell he wants and has no interest in working or being famous.
"No, I was not pounding six grand of heroin every month or whatever," Culkin said of reports a few years ago that he was addicted to hard drugs. "The thing that bugged me was tabloids wrapping it all in this weird guise of concern. No, you're trying to shift papers."
Culkin and his publicist paint the interview as his comeback story, but Culkin has no real plans to return to work, instead busying himself with bizarre passion projects—like the aforementioned band Pizza Underground, which brought him widespread ridicule.
"It's one of those good ideas you have when you're drunk, and you wake up and forget about it, Culkin said. "But we're taking it to the end of the joke. We have an album coming out, a vinyl pressing with a children's choir, a symphony orchestra. We're giving it away, our gift to the world."
And you have to feel bad for the guy. Our celebrity culture has this masochistic desire to watch child stars fail. But here, you see a guy who just wants to be left alone, to go out on dates without being surrounded by paparazzi and idiots with camera phones.
