At the event, he revealed another anecdote: To this day, he has a scar from filming the movie, courtesy of co-star Joe Pesci.
“He bit me during rehearsal. The thing you have to remember [is] I’m not really on screen with Joe and Dan [Stern] for a lot of the movie. They’re off doing everything. I was just talking to the ether, so I didn’t know him all that well,” he commented. “This is one of the last days of filming and I’m hung up there, so vulnerable,” he laughed, recalling the scene where his character Kevin McCallister is caught by the Wet Bandits and dangling from a coat hook, “and [Pesci] goes to Dan, ‘Dan, you want to run lines?’ So, he even asked me, I was like, ‘Yeah, sure,’ because I don’t have any lines in that scene.” He said, ‘I’m [going to bite] these fingers off one at a time,’ and then sank his teeth into my finger. I was like ‘Ahhh!’ You should have seen his face because he knew he bit a nine-year-old. A nine-year-old coworker,” Culkin said.
Pesci, he said, apologized.
“I was like, ‘Oh yeah, just don’t do it again,’” he recalled of his reaction. “So, yeah, it actually left a mark. It’s 35 years later, and I still have this little divot right here. This is Joey Baby’s tooth. Not the gold one, the regular one. He gave me a souvenir. It’s a nice story to regale you guys with. It’s worth it now, but back then it was just like, ‘Who is this creep?’”
The actor explained that he holds no grudges against Pesci, though he did say he’s contemplated taking revenge now, decades later.
“He plays golf with a neighbor of mine, and he was always talking, ‘Joey’s coming over,’” Culkin said. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, yeah, you guys should just come over, ring my doorbell, and it’ll be fine.’”
“I want my kids to set up traps for him,” he explained. “They’re only really into that—you ever show kids this movie, next thing you know the next month, all they do set traps for you? I get reported back to me all the time. My kids are starting to do that now, too.”
Originally published in Vanity Fair Spain.
