Catherine O’Hara, famed for her roles in Home Alone and Schitt’s Creek, once admitted she found it tough to say a particularly ‘horrific’ line to her on-screen son, Macaulay Culkin.
In the beloved 1990 Christmas film, O’Hara portrayed Kate McCallister, mother to Culkin’s Kevin. Directed by Chris Columbus, the movie follows Kevin as he is mistakenly left at home while his family flies off to their holiday celebrations.
Early on, after a quarrel with his family before their trip to Paris, Kate sends Kevin to the attic as punishment, saying she doesn’t want to see him “for the rest of the night”.
Kevin snaps back: “I don’t want to see you again for the rest of my life, and I don’t want to see anybody else, either.” His mother counters: “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.”
Catherine O’Hara was a story in Home Alone (Image: Internet Unknown)
O’Hara confessed that saying this line to Culkin was difficult and nearly ‘killed her. ‘ Speaking last year when she received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, she reminisced: “The scene where I had to drag him upstairs to sleep in the attic ’cause he’d misbehaved, he’s mouthing off about the family and I say, ‘Well, you’d be pretty sad if you woke up tomorrow morning and you had no family,’ and he says, ‘No, I wouldn’t.'”
“And 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.”
She continued to praise Macaulay Culkin, who was just 10 years old when he starred in the hit movie. Catherine O’Hara remarked: “This beautiful 10 year old little boy was called a superstar, a moneymaker, one of the hottest leading young men in Hollywood by the world over. How does anyone survive that? I believe you’d have to possess a certain quality, a gift, that dear John Hughes obviously recognized in you Macaulay, your sense of humour.”
“It’s a sign of intelligence in a child and a key to surviving life at any age. From what I see, you have brought that sense of sweet yet twisted, yet totally relatable, sense of humor to everything you have chosen to do since Home Alone.”
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