Donald Trump has rejected a claim by movie director Chris Columbus that he “bullied” his way into his brief appearance in the 1992 hit movie ‘Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.’ He argued that the scene with him helped to make the iconic Christmas film a success.
Writing on his Truth Social platform on Wednesday, Trump insisted that the sequel producers at the time were “begging me to make a cameo appearance.”
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In the film, a sequel to the 1990 classic ‘Home Alone,’ Trump is briefly seen speaking to central character Kevin McAllister in a scene, who was played by the then-eleven-year-old Macaulay Culkin. “They rented the Plaza hotel in New York, which I owned at the time,” Trump wrote. “I was very busy, and didn’t want to do it. They were very nice, but above all, persistent.”
But once an agreement was struck, “that little cameo took off like a rocket and the movie was a big success,” he stated.
In his 2020 interview with Business Insider, Columbus said that Trump’s brief appearance came about as a condition demanded by him to permit the production team to use the Plaza’s lobby for a scene in the film. Trump owned the iconic New York hotel between 1987 and 1995.
“He did bully his way into the movie,” Columbus recalled, paraphrasing Trump as having stipulated: “The only way you can use the Plaza is if I’m in the movie.”
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“Nothing could be further from the truth,” Trump insisted on Truth Social. “That cameo helped make the movie a success, but if they felt bullied, or didn’t want me, why did they put me in, and keep me there, for over 30 years?” Trump added that Columbus’ contradiction is an example of “another Hollywood guy from the past looking for a quick fix of Trump publicity for himself.”
Trump’s cameo has been a source of several headlines in recent years. In 2019, he claimed that an edited-for-TV version of the film for Canadian audiences removed Trump’s bit part at the behest of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
A spokesperson for the CBC television network said at the time that the scene, along with several others, were removed due to time constraints because it was “not integral to the plot.”
Meanwhile, in 2021 the star of the Home Alone films Macaulay Culkin, who is now 43, said he was “sold” on the idea of Trump’s cameo being digitally removed from all future versions of the film.
In the Home Alone films, Culkin plays a young boy who is accidentally separated from his family during the Christmas holidays, and who fights off a pair of thieves played by Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern. The film made $359 million at the box office and was 1992’s third highest-grossing movie.