Sometimes you’ve got to suffer for your art, and that’s what Macaulay Culkin did making Christmas movie Home Alone. During a sequence in which Joe Pesci’s character is trying to eat the fingers of Culkin’s Kevin McCallister, the acclaimed after left a mark that’s still there.
Culkin revealed it during an interview on Late Night with Conan O’Brien. “It’s one of the scenes where they hang me up on the closet door, and he says ‘I’m going to bite each one of your fingers off, one a time’,” Culkin recalls. “During rehearsals he actually bit me. It broke the skin and everything, I’m a little nine-year-old boy and he’s going around biting them. I still have the scar!”
Ouch. Given the cartoonish violence of the family movie, in which Kevin has to defend his home from burglars at Christmas, Culkin may have gotten off easy. Pesci and co-star Daniel Stern’s crooks receive all sorts of heinous injuries, from electrocution to fire.
Naturally, Culkin wasn’t exactly happy, and told off the Goodfellas star after it happened. “I got really mad at him!” Culkin says. “I said ‘I don’t care how many Oscars you have or whatever, biting a nine-year-old, what heck’s wrong with you?'”
They don’t talk about Home Alone 2, the 1992 kids movie sequel where Kevin has to fend off the same criminals in New York City, but we’d like to think the lesson was learned there and tend. Chris Columbus directed both thriller movies, which also feature Catherin O’Hara and John Heard in the cast.
For more festive joy, have a look at our lists of the best Netflix Christmas movies, Where are the Home Alone cast now, best Amazon Prime Christmas movies, and best Disney Plus Christmas movies.