Chris Columbus Says Macaulay Culkin’s “Shaky” Family Life Amidst ‘Home Alone’ Fame Influenced His ‘Harry Potter’ Casting: “Parents Had To Be A Big Part Of It”

Chris Columbus learned a lot from directing Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone and Home Alone 2: Lost In New York, and shared how the experience impacted his casting of Harry Potter.

Columbus, who helmed both Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, spoke to Demi Lovato in her new documentary Child Star, explaining that he himself “came from a working-class family” and witnessed the way some child actors became the sole financial support for their own families, per Entertainment Weekly.

“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,” he shared. “Particularly if you’re doing a franchise.”

Columbus said that within a year after the first Home Alone film was released, “Macaulay Culkin became a huge star, and that was unexpected.” But while working on the film adaptations of J.K. Rowling’s novels, Columbus knew they had the potential to be “extraordinarily successful.”

In terms of the “very intense” casting of the wizarding trio of Harry, Ron, and Hermione — which ultimately went to Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson — he noted that he “had to put blinders on because that’s all [he] 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?'” he recalled. “And that, you take that information and you bring it back to the actor and the actor’s parents: ‘This is gonna get pretty intense.'”

Nonetheless, Columbus “felt a tremendous responsibility to the actors,” as the “kids signed on for, like, five movies.”

“That’s the rest of your life as a child star,” he continued. “That’s gonna be your legacy, and you have to learn how to live with that.”

However, Columbus shed light on the importance of the actors’ parents, saying that he “realized that parents had to be a big part of it.”

“I can’t have him go home to a really sort of shaky environment for the sake of a film,” he claimed. “It’s not worth it. It was as important to cast the parents as it was to cast the kids.”

As noted by Variety, Culkin opened up about his strained relationship with his father, calling him a “bad man” on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast in 2018.

“He was abusive, physically and mentally — I can show you all my scars if I wanted to,” he said at the time.

Home Alone actor Daniel Stern acknowledged the “adult pressure” Culkin endured in his memoir Home and Alone, writing that “he was a sweet kid but had lived a very different life than my kids.”

“He didn’t know how to play tag or throw the ball around,” Stern wrote. “He was more of an indoor kid and had a lot of adult pressure on him from show business and parents and such.”

Child Star is streaming on Hulu.