Catherine O’Hara, the star of Home Alone and Schitt’s Creek, once confessed that she found it difficult to deliver a particular ‘horrific’ line to her on-screen son, Macaulay Culkin.
In the 1990 Christmas classic, O’Hara played Kate McCallister, mother to Culkin’s character, Kevin. The film, directed by Chris Columbus, sees Kevin accidentally left behind when his family jets off for their holiday festivities. Early in the movie, Kevin has a spat with his family just before they depart for Paris.
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As punishment, Kate sends him to sleep in the attic, telling him she doesn’t want to see him “for the rest of the night”. Kevin retorts: “I don’t want to see you again for the rest of my life, and I don’t want to see anybody else, either.”
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To which his mother responds: “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.”
It was hard for Catherine to deliver one not-so-motherly line (
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O’Hara admitted that delivering this line to Culkin was a struggle and it almost ‘killed her.’ At a ceremony last year where she unveiled her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, she recalled: “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 laud Macaulay, who was merely 10 years old when he starred in the hit film. Catherine expressed: “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.”
