Real Kids Have Been Giving Catherine O’Hara Crap for Abandoning Her Son in ‘Home Alone’

Watching the Home Alone movies as an adult is a decidedly different experience than watching it as a kid — especially if you’re a parent. The story of a small boy who is abandoned and endangered by his parents, who then has to fend for himself by developing a thirst for burglar blood, doesn’t play quite the same as it once did. 

It’s hard not to judge Kevin McCallister’s parents. They banish their eight-year-old to the attic for spilling some Pepsi, even though it was clearly the result of his older brother’s toxic bullying? Then they forget about him entirely while flying to Paris. And the only reason why the McCallisters don’t realize that one of their children is missing at first is because they opt to buy first-class tickets for themselves only. 

Merry Christmas. 

Okay, sure, all parents make mistakes. But, in the sequel, the McCallisters somehow lose Kevin again. This time, it’s because they’re rushing through a crowded airport, and are more concerned with catching a flight to Florida than ensuring that their child is safe. Although, to be fair, American Airlines deserves some of the blame too.

But it’s not just grown-ups who blame the McCallister parents for their annual holiday gross negligence — even kids seem to know that child services should have been notified between movies. 

Catherine O’Hara, who of course, played Kate McCallister in the first two movies (but not the canonically-confusing sequels) recently chatted with CNN. When asked about why the Home Alone movies are still so beloved, she replied, “It’s just an everlastingly great story. And so beautifully executed.”

But some kids, perhaps not understanding that O’Hara is an actor, won’t hesitate to give her crap for her character’s actions. “So many times, children come up to me and say, ‘Why would you do that to your child?’” O’Hara recalled. “’Why would you lose your child?’”

Last year, the SCTV star went into even more detail about these awkward encounters with pint-sized fans. “A child came up to me, like, a little eight-year-old, in a mall,” she told TODAY’s Willie Geist. “'Are you Kevin’s mom?’ I said, ‘Well, yeah, I played Kevin’s mom in a movie, yes.’ ‘Why did you leave him?’ ‘Sorry. It was in the script.’”

But the conversation wasn’t over. “You left him twice,” the kid argued. When she pointed out that it was just a sequel, he responded, “Isn’t that called abandonment?” 

O’Hara could only apologize. 

Even O’Hara herself has publicly expressed disapproval of her Home Alone character. During Macaulay Culkin’s Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony last December, O’Hara admitted that she had a hard time delivering some of the lines during the scene in which Kate escorts Kevin to the attic, particularly when she tells him that he should wish for his family to disappear because “maybe it will happen.”

“I could not wrap my head around saying something so horrific to this beautiful child,” she told the crowd, before adding the caveat, “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."

Hopefully none of the kids who called out O’Hara have turned to paintcan-based violence.