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Macaulay Culkin is making rare comments about his father Christopher “Kit” Culkin, after being estranged for more than 30 years.
Culkin, 44, opened up to Kate Hudson and Oliver Hudson on their “Sibling Revelry” podcast, blasting his father and insisting he will raise his own children differently.
The “Home Alone” actor recalled, “It’s one of my earliest memories of him was [thinking] when I grew up, this is how I’m not gonna be with my kids.”
Culkin shares Dakota, nearly 4, and Carson, 2, with fiancée Brenda Song. He confessed that having his own kids “kicks up some dust” from the past.
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He shared, “I kinda go… I can’t believe he was like that. He had all these lovely kids. It’s crazy.”
Macaulay said of cutting out his dad, “Oh, he deserves it, too. Yeah. He’s a man who, he had seven kids, and now he has four grandkids. Yeah. And, none of them want anything to do with him.”
While Culkin believes if he was in his dad’s shoes he would assume he was at fault, but, “I have more than an inkling that he does not feel that way.”
The actor called his father “narcissistic” and alleged he was “abusive.”
Kit and his partner Patricia Brentrup split in 1995 after 21 years and seven children together.
Macaulay said when they broke up, “I wanted nothing to do with my f**king father. Like, he was just the worst.”
He refused to go to visitations with Kit, and remembered, “I told my lawyer, I said, ‘Yeah, I’m not doing that.’ He said, ‘Well, you know, you’ll be in contempt of court,’ and this and that. I go, ‘Okay. Well, how about this? I dare the judge to put me in jail for not wanting to visit [my] abusive father. I actually I’m gonna double down on that. I double dare him to arrest the most famous kid in the world.”
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Culkin had previously accused his actor father of abuse in 2018 on the “WTF with Marc Maron” podcast.
Macaulay said at the time, “[He said,] ‘Do good or I’ll hit you.’ He was a bad man. He was abusive, physically and mentally — I can show you all my scars if I wanted to. Everything he tried to do in life, I excelled at before I was 10 years old.”
Kit’s partner Jeanette Krylowski, who has since died, told New York magazine in 2011 that Kit was not abusive.
“My analysis is [Brentrup] was the only one not getting famous and she felt left behind,” Krylowski said. “The kids do what Mom tells them to, because through the years, Mom had said, ‘Your father doesn’t love you, your father doesn’t love you.'”
Years later, in 2016, Kit told DailyMail.com, “I don’t consider [Macaulay] a son anymore.”
The elder Culkin had suffered a stroke, and a source told the paper, “Since the stroke, Kit’s come to terms with not seeing his kids again. If they won’t make contact when he’s at death’s door, what hope does he have in the future?”
The insider added, “He’s stopped beating himself up about it and isn’t bitter anymore. He’s found peace.”
Meanwhile, Macaulay’s brother Kieran is also estranged from their dad.
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At the 2024 Daytime Emmys, he praised his mom, while dissing his dad. Kieran told reporters, “She’s just an absolutely wonderful woman who took on raising seven kids in a studio apartment by herself… There was a guy there — he didn’t do anything.”
Despite his rough childhood, Macaulay told “Sibling Revelry” he is “really good… I’m probably in the best place of my entire life.”
As for having more kids, Culkin said, “Oh, we’ll see about that. Well, you know, we always kick the can down the road, you know, and so we should talk about it next year, that kind of thing, you know. Obviously, right now, we’re actually in a spot where we actually have some really great stability. Both kids are in preschool right now. And we have a good routine. Brenda really starting to feel like herself again.”