Macaulay Culkin says his day-to-day life got better once he cut off contact with his father, Kit Culkin.
The 45-year-old actor opened up about the decision on a recent episode of the SmartLess podcast with hosts Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, and Will Arnett.
“I had a pretty acrimonious relationship with my father, famously,” Culkin said around the 22:20 mark when asked whether he still speaks to his parents, who managed his career as a child. “As soon as I was able to kind of push him out, my quality of life on a day-to-day level definitely went up.”
Kit Culkin managed Macaulay during his massive run in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when he starred in hits like Home Alone and My Girl, before the actor stepped away from Hollywood at age 14.
“I was done. I was like, ‘I hope you all made your money, because there’s no more coming from me,’” Culkin recalled. “I made my name, I made my mark, I made my fortune.” He added that acting is now purely optional for him. “The only reason why I even do it now is because I like to do it. Pay, pleasure, prestige. That’s the only reason to do a gig. Technically, I’m retired right now. Like, I retire and then if I find something I like, I unretire, do that, and I immediately retire afterward. Every gig is my last.”
Looking back, Culkin said he remembers exactly when acting stopped being fun. “I wanted to take a break, and I said I was getting really taxed,” he explained, adding that his request to do “a semester of school” was ignored. “That was something that really affected me, and affected my work and stuff like that. And then it was just like, ‘Oh, I’m on the hamster wheel and I can’t get off!’”
“Once I had some autonomy and some agency in my life, I grabbed it with both hands,” he added.
Stepping away from fame allowed Culkin to experience a more typical teenage life. He shared that he “fell in love, got drunk for the first time, things like that.”
“I was kind of just drifting around, and tried to figure out what I wanted out of life and so forth,” he said. “I didn’t find it. I wanted to explore that in a different way, on my terms.”
Last year, Culkin admitted in an Instagram post that he has a “complicated relationship” with Father’s Day.
Previously, during a 2018 appearance on the WTF with Marc Maron podcast, Culkin described his father as “abusive, physically and mentally,” adding, “I can show you all my scars if I wanted to.”
Though mostly retired, Culkin still pops up in projects from time to time, including voice work in Zootopia 2, a cameo in Netflix’s Running Point, a six-episode stint on American Horror Story: Double Feature, and voice acting on Adult Swim’s Robot Chicken.
Outside of acting, Culkin is focused on family life with his two children, Dakota and Carson, whom he shares with fiancée Brenda Song.
