Every year, right around the holiday season, we collectively sit back, think about the people who are important to us, and wonder if they’re still trying to murder strange men in a labyrinthine homespun suburban torture maze. Usually, this makes us think about that guy from Tinder that we had been seeing for a while. Sometimes, though, it brings us around to Macaulay Culkin.
Culkin ingrained himself in the public consciousness more than 30 years ago with Home Alone, pulling in just shy of half a billion dollars at the box office and making audiences around the world believe in a child’s ability to permanently disfigure burglars. In the years that followed, he remained a pinnacle of theatrical drawing power, making a new generation of children care about Harvey Comics’ Richie Rich in a way that no one could have foreseen and, in a particularly passive-aggressive move, dying of too many bees in My Girl.
And then he was gone. A few years of high-publicity post-child-star antics, and the guy was out of the spotlight. It was enough to make a person wonder: What’s he doing for a living these days? Working at Zappos or what?
What’s Macaulay Culkin’s work/life balance like?
The answer, to the best of anyone’s ability to tell, is “being Macaulay Culkin.” In an interview on Ellen back in 2018, Culkin confided that he’d been informed of his extreme wealth on or around his 18th birthday when he came into the money he’d earned as a child star. Referring to the occasion as his “slip of paper meeting,” he recalled being passed a note from a representative, letting him know that he had enough money to take care of himself forever, as long as he was smart. At present, his net worth is estimated to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $18 million.
As a result, Culkin now treats work “like a hobby,” while running Bunny Ears, his own digital media company. He still shows up in projects from time to time, making always-excellent contributions to the Red Letter Media YouTube channel, guesting on a couple of episodes of The Righteous Gemstones, giving a critically praised performance in American Horror Story: Double Feature, and lending his voice to cartoons like Robot Chicken and Netflix’s Entergalactic. But thanks to his unique position as possibly the most visible child of the 1990s, he has the privilege of getting to work, not needing to.
Meanwhile, his brother Kieran Culkin still has to appear in award-winning prestige premium cable shows and have his every performance lauded as breathtakingly complex and brilliant. What a rube.