and extracts from the main article:
Macaulay Culkin Is Not Like You
............... But he was gone for so long. Or seemed gone. A kind of nether-celebrity. What about the stories about Michael Jackson? The drugs—that photograph, when he looked so skinny? Why did he stop making movies?
Is he weird? He’s weird, right?
Before the shot, when no one else is around, he says to me, quietly, “This is not really my cup of tea. These are all lovely people, but the poking, the prodding—honestly, it’s part of why I don’t do this anymore. Any of it.”
And yet here he is, and on the set, when it’s time to pose, he is golden. He awaits instruction, a pillar amid swirling photographer’s assistants and helpers and a groomer and production people. He occasionally warbles along with the radio, but otherwise he says little, stands where he is asked, politely obliges when a different angle of the neck is requested. He positions and repositions his body; says, “Okay” and “Sure” and “Like this?”
He is working.
The photographer asks him to lean against the wooden wall, and he does. Then he rests his head against the wall, which makes him look contemplative, but really he’s just posing, because these are the conventions of celebrity: the pose, the hair spray, the fashion credits, the staring into the camera. It’s what celebrities do to promote their next movie, their new song, their comeback.
The thing is, Macaulay Culkin isn’t promoting anything at all. What’s more, he would apparently rather be home with his cats. .............................
A month before Hughes died, in 2009, Michael Jackson died after being given an overdose of medication. If Hughes sometimes played the father Mack’s father couldn’t be, Jackson was often the schoolmate he never had. Jackson got in touch with Mack after Home Alone, and suddenly they were hanging out. His parents neither encouraged nor discouraged the friendship. The way Mack sees it, Michael had a similar childhood, which is to say that he didn’t really have one, because his father was forcing fame upon him. So, at twenty-two years older than Mack, living in a place called Neverland, he felt the same age, in a way.
Mack and Jackson used to prank-call people. Jackson used to do these voices, real nerdy—“Hello, I’d like to buy a refrigerator. How big are your refrigerators?” And Mack would laugh and laugh.
The last time Mack saw him was in the men’s room at the Santa Barbara County Superior Courthouse in 2005. Mack was twenty-four. Michael was forty-six. Mack was testifying in Jackson’s defense in People v. Michael Jackson, in which the singer was charged with intoxicating and molesting a thirteen-year-old boy who had cancer. He was eventually acquitted.
There was a short recess during Mack’s testimony. Mack took a leak, and Michael came in. Jackson said, “We better not talk. I don’t want to influence your testimony.” They laughed a little at this. Michael Jackson, who had been more famous perhaps even than Macaulay Culkin when he was eight, ten, eleven years old, looked whipped. Exhausted. Drained.
They hugged.
I ask Mack if he is bothered that people assume—because he was one of many boys who spent time at Jackson’s home, some of whom accused him of heinous acts of sexual abuse—Jackson must have abused him, too.
“Look,” he says. “I’m gonna begin with the line—it’s not a line, it’s the truth: He never did anything to me. I never saw him do anything. And especially at this flash point in time, I’d have no reason to hold anything back. The guy has passed on. If anything—I’m not gonna say it would be stylish or anything like that, but right now is a good time to speak up. And if I had something to speak up about, I would totally do it. But no, I never saw anything; he never did anything. ............
“It’s nice to see Mack out there doing stuff, and not getting caught by paparazzi looking hungover one particular day,” says his friend Har Mar Superstar, a performer who toured alongside the Pizza Underground. “We all have rough moments, but he was under a microscope. People love to see a child star fail for some reason. But now people know he’s alive and has opinions and has a good heart and isn’t some dark character that people want to create.”
Brenda hopes that Mack will get back into his profession for real. “I truly believe that he is the actor he is now because of all the things he had to go through,” she says. “He has gone through so much tragedy; he’s had so many ups, so many downs; he’s seen the ugly side of this industry; he’s also seen the amazing side of this industry. So he can pinpoint exactly what he doesn’t want and what he doesn’t like about it. But yeah, I hope, I hope, I hope.”
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