Macaulay Culkin’s Family Issues Following ‘Home Alone’ Taught Chris Columbus to Be Careful When Casting ‘Harry Potter’
After hearing about Macaulay Culkin’s much-publicized struggles with his own parents ever since Home Alone made him a massive star, Chris Columbus knew that the world’s most magical orphan needed to be played by a child actor whose home life was more stable than the Dursley household.
Between Home Alone, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Mrs. Doubtfire, the legendary director has had a hand in forming some of the most high-profile child acting careers in Hollywood history, for better or for worse. The young stars of those projects, Culkin, Daniel Radcliffe and Mara Wilson respectively, have had ample time and media coverage to publicly reflect on how becoming famous so early in their lives affected their growth as artists and as adults, but Columbus himself hasn’t had to answer questions about the uncomfortable challenges that underaged celebrities faced in every PEOPLE interview for the rest of his life quite like his kid actors do.
Don't Miss
However, in the recently released Hulu documentary series Child Star, Columbus offers his own thoughts on how Culkin’s struggle with superstardom and the family friction it caused influenced his casting decisions when he helmed the first Harry Potter film adaptation. “That’s the rest of your life as a child star,” Columbus said of the crucial casting that led to Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint becoming world-famous virtually overnight at a startlingly young age. “That’s gonna be your legacy, and you have to learn how to live with that.”
Culkin’s high-profile court case to block his parents from controlling his $20 million trust fund when he was just 15 is already public knowledge — though Culkin has since clarified that, contrary to what was reported at the time, he didn’t seek legal emancipation from his parents — but, behind the scenes, Culkin says that he suffered physical and mental abuse at the hands of his father, from whom he has been estranged since his teen years. In Child Star, Columbus said that he wasn’t aware of Culkin’s troubled home life during the making of Home Alone, but in hindsight, he sees how the unique stressors of show business can create horrible family situations for young actors.
“We went from shooting ‘Home Alone’ (where) nobody cared, but in the course of a year, Macaulay Culkin became a huge star, and that was unexpected,” Columbus told Child Star documentarian and former child star herself Demi Lovato, noting the differences between the making of the surprise smash hit Christmas comedy and the highly anticipated first Harry Potter film, “It’s not like Harry Potter, where you know that it may be extraordinarily successful. … I came from a working-class family, and I’ve seen it a couple of times with kids when you see someone who comes from a working-class family, and suddenly they’re thrown into — the kid becomes the breadwinner for the family.”
When Columbus began working on the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, he tried to prepare potential child cast members as best he could for the permanently life-changing implications of landing the role. “I had to put blinders on because that’s all I was hearing everywhere. You go on the street, you go into a pub, you go anywhere, and people are saying, ‘Who are you gonna cast? Who’s gonna be Harry Potter, who’s gonna be Harry Potter?’” Columbus recalled of the casting process back in 2000. “You take that information and you bring it back to the actor and the actor’s parents: ‘This is gonna get pretty intense.’”
Columbus said that he “felt a tremendous responsibility” to ensure that both the child actors who would appear in the many Harry Potter movies “knew what they were getting into,” noting how important it was to pick kids whose parents could handle the fame and fortune while keeping their children’s needs as the top priority. “Suddenly, I realized that parents had to be a big part of it,” Columbus said. “I can’t have (an actor) go home to a really sort of shaky environment for the sake of a film. It’s not worth it. It was as important to cast the parents as it was to cast the kids.”
As opposed to how Culkin’s father treated his famous son, Radcliffe still maintains that the support of his family and his close relationship with his parents kept him grounded throughout his ascension to stardom. Clearly, Columbus has a great eye for parental talent.
