A few weeks ago, Snap Judgement/NPR’s Spooked podcast did an episode dedicated to the “Home Alone Curse.” The story was told by actor Larry Hankin, who plays Larry the officer in the first movie. He’s the one eating a glazed donut as Kate McCallister is pleading with him over the phone to send someone to check on Kevin. Apparently, Larry was very close to stepping in to take over for Daniel Stern as Marv early into production. Obviously, Stern stayed on, but a few weeks later, Larry got a call begging him to take a part that they created just for him. Why? Because they believed that the movie was cursed because Larry hadn’t been cast in it and there were all sorts of mishaps that were slowing down production in general. It’s a really fun listen.
Although Larry showed up to break the curse, that wasn’t the end of the movie’s mishaps. Macaulay Culkin has been doing a tour with screenings of Home Alone and a Q&A afterward called, “A Nostalgic Night With Macaulay Culkin,” During a screening in Illinois, Macaulay shared that a rehearsal for the scene where Harry (Joe Pesci) threatened to bite Kevin’s fingers off, Pesci went a little too far and accidentally bit Mac’s hand. In fact, he bit it so hard that Culkin says he has a scar from it.
“All the great ones leave their mark,” Daniel Stern’s Marv tells Joe Pesci’s Harry in “Home Alone,” yet it seems like Pesci is actually the one who left a mark in real life.
During a screening of the classic 1990 Christmas comedy earlier this month in Rosemont, Illinois, star Macaulay Culkin, who played Kevin McCallister, revealed that Pesci, who, along with Stern, played a pair of bungling burglars, actually bit him while they rehearsed a scene in which Harry threatened to bite off Kevin’s fingers.
“He was trying to scare me,” Culkin said about working together, according to The New York Times.
“He was like, I want to be menacing to this kid,” he added.
Pesci allegedly bit down on Culkin, who is now 44.
“I have a scar,” Culkin said.
“I saw his face — and I’ve never, ever seen Joe Pesci actually scared,” Culkin added. “Because he’s like, I just bit a kid!”
The New York Times reports Pesci declined to comment through his rep on the matter.
“Home Alone,” which turned Culkin into a star, continues to be his signature role and biggest claim to fame. When he was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2023, his mom from the movie, played by Catherine O’Hara, was on hand to deliver a speech.
“I know you worked really hard. I know you did,” she said. “But you made acting look like the most natural thing in the world to do. It really was as if we had ambushed the home of this real little boy named Kevin to make a movie and he just went along with it for the fun of it. It’s the dearest thing.”
My family and I watch Home Alone and Home Alone 2 every year, so I’m always really curious to know more of those movies’ lure. My only question after hearing Mac’s story is how frigging hard was Pesci biting down in order to leave not only a mark but a scar?! That is either some crazy commitment to character acting or someone who in that moment could not separate his other, more “intense” works while in that moment. Of course, there’s also always the third option that Mac was exaggerating about the scar, lol. While Pesci may not have commented, Stern did recently talk to Entertainment Tonight about working with him, explaining that he’s a “scary dude,” and talking about one of my favorite scenes, where Marv tries to kill the tarantula. It really does sound like this movie was insane to shoot. Next year is the 35th anniversary of its release and I’d love it if the cast all sat down and did a retrospective. That would be so awesome.
photos credit Getty and screenshots from Home Alone on Disney+
I hope Pesci apologized, and I hope Macaulay got a tetanus shot.
Yikes! A bite that’s nasty enough to scar someone’s skin is a nasty loss of control on JP’s part. It feels wrong to hear that this is only being mentioned decades later.
Some of these adult actors seem to forget that they’re working with children. Yes they’re actors but they’re little kids. You can’t just lay hands on them and hurt them.
I could see a scenario where he accidentally hit too hard, like misjudged the distance? But then why not just admit that and apologize. I love HA and HA2 so a retrospective would be amazing!
We finally watched Home Alone and Home Alone 2 this year with my 11 and 9 year olds, and they LOVE it. They proceeded to watch all the rest of the iterations of Home Alone but none are as good as the first two. There was truly some magic happening in those two films.
I like that Macauley is finally embracing his child stardom. He seems in a lot healthier place than he was for years.
For the last two Christmases, my 5 and 8 year old have been obsessed with 1 and 2. It’s on constant repeat in our house during the holidays and I’m surprised that it’s not annoying me to death yet.
We regularly laugh that my 5 year old repeats Kevin’s “ -A lovely cheese pizza just for me”. I tell my kids “easy on the Pepsi, Fuller” when they are chugging their drinks.