Inside Macaulay Culkin's Childhood Trauma — Including his Financial Struggles and Parents' Divorce Before He 'Retired' from Acting at 14

Before fame, Macaulay Culkin and his family lived together in a tiny apartment in New York City. According to his brother Kieran Culkin, their childhood home was "barely suitable for a couple," let alone for a family of nine.

Kieran described their place in his 2018 interview with Vanity Fair: "It was just a hallway, and there were no separating doors, except for the bathroom, which didn't have a lock. They raised seven kids in that apartment — for years. They just kept bringing babies home to this little space."

Their parents, Kit and Brentrup, ended up meeting a stage manager at Ensemble Studio Theater, and they were later introduced to casting director Billy Hopkins, who gave Macaulay his first role at 6 years old in the 1988 drama Rocket Gibraltar.

Reflecting on the family's humble beginnings, Billy told New York Magazine: "They were so poor I had to use my own money to make sure that he got to and from rehearsal. Macaulay would crawl under the bleachers at the theater to look for change that had fallen out of people's pockets."

Macaulay then appeared in Uncle Buck before his breakthrough appearance in Home Alone.

The Culkin kids all became child actors, which allowed their family to relocate into a larger home. However, in the summer of 1995, their mother sought custody of the six minor children and permission to manage their careers.

Kit did not contest the custody arrangement two years later.

In 2020, the My Girl actor told Esquire he and his siblings did not want to go with their father after their parents split. He filed a legal request to erase Kit and Brentrup's names from his trust fund and appointed an executor to manage his finances.

Macaulay said: "When I did that, the whole thing kinda ended a lot faster. Basically, I had millions and millions of dollars in the bank and my mother couldn't pay the rent because she was spending all of her money on lawyers."

He continued: "We were about to get evicted from our apartment. The only way I could get access to that money was to take my father's name off it, but I didn't want to make it messy, so I figured I'd take both their names off."

During his appearance in the "WTF With Marc Maron" podcast in 2018, the American Horror Story alum said Kit treated him badly because the patriarch resented his success as an actor.

Macaulay said: "[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."

He also talked about his estranged father in his novel Junior, explaining he wrote the 2006 book to "rest" and give closure to his relationship with Kit.

Macaulay said of his father during an interview with New York Magazine: "He would black out all the terrible things that he did, and that hurt me more, because he'd go to bed at night thinking he was a good person. People do bad things in their lives. And those [sorts] of things are forgivable. That's half the point of having confession in church — you need to be able to fess up to what you've done. He just couldn't."

The actor said of the paparazzi harassing him during the early days of his career: "It was one of those paranoias like, 'There are people in the bushes! There are people in the bushes!' But there really are people in the bushes. It was that kind of thing."

He revealed to The Guardian he felt overwhelmed and isolated due to the pitfalls of being a child actor.

In 1994, Macaulay retired from acting after starring in Richie Rich due to his desire to have a normal life.

He admitted: "[I was] starting off high school, so I decided to tell my mother, my representatives… 'I don't wanna do this anymore, I wanna go to school, I wanna make friends… so don't even bring up movies, don't even bring up acting. I told them to call it retirement… I never wanted to do it again."

Six years later, he returned to the industry and starred in the Off-Broadway debut of Madame Melville.