Director Chris Columbus still isn’t thrilled about U.S. President Donald Trump’s cameo in 1992’s “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.”
Columbus directed the sequel to the hugely popular 1990 Christmas classic “Home Alone,” and shared with the San Francisco Chronicle in an interview published Tuesday that Trump’s appearance in the film has since become “an albatross for me” and “wishes it was gone.”]
In the movie, Trump plays himself when he encounters Kevin McAllister (Macaulay Culkin) – who got separated from his family and ends up in the Big Apple – inside the Plaza Hotel, with the boy asking the then-New York City businessman and real estate magnate for directions to the hotel’s lobby. Trump points him in the right direction.
It’s a brief scene that Columbus said he “can’t cut,” adding that if he does, he thinks he’d “probably be sent out of the country.”
“I’ll be considered sort of not fit to live in the United States,” he added.
Columbus has previously spoken about how Trump wound up in the film in the first place, telling Business Insider in 2020 Trump would only allow them to film inside the Plaza, which he owned at the time, if he was in the movie.
“So we agreed to put him in the movie, and when we screened it for the first time the oddest thing happened: people cheered when Trump showed up on-screen,” he said at the time. “So I said to my editor, ‘Leave him in the movie. It’s a moment for the audience.’ But he did bully his way into the movie.”
In 2023, Trump addressed his appearance in the movie, writing on Truth Social at the time, “I was very busy, and didn’t want to do it. They were very nice, but above all, persistent. I agreed, and the rest is history! That little cameo took off like a rocket, and the movie was a big success.”
“Now, however, 30 years later, Columbus (what was his real name?) put out a statement that I bullied myself into the movie,” he later added. “Nothing could be further from the truth. That cameo helped make the movie a success.”
But Columbus took issue with that statement in the Chronicle this week, saying of Trump’s “Home Alone 2” cameo, “Years later, it’s become this curse. It’s become this thing that I wish it was not there. What’s going through this guy’s mind? He said I was lying. I’m not lying. He said I begged him to be in the movie, but there’s no world I would ever beg a non-actor to be in a movie. But we were desperate to get the Plaza Hotel.”
“Home Alone 2: Lost in New York” stars Culkin, Catherine O’Hara, John Heard, Tim Curry, Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern, and grossed $359 million, an impressive figure for the early ’90s.
