Film-maker Chris Columbus says he has come to regard Donald Trump’s cameo in his movie Home Alone 2: Lost in New York as “an albatross” that he wishes to remove.
But, Columbus added, he fears the president’s administration would deport him if he followed through with nixing the scene from more than 30 years ago.
“It’s become this curse,” Columbus told the San Francisco Chronicle in an interview published on Monday. “It’s become an albatross for me. I just wish it was gone.”
Though born and raised in the US, the San Francisco resident of Italian ancestry said he worried he would “have to go back to Italy or something” if he erased the cameo.
Columbus’s comments – made in advance of a tribute he is scheduled to receive at the 68th San Francisco international film festival on 26 April – revisited a controversy that began in 2020, toward the conclusion of Trump’s first presidency. The director of the first two Home Alone films told Business Insider that Trump’s cameo in the 1992 sequel was a condition of being able to film inside New York’s Plaza hotel, which Trump owned at the time.
Trump, best known at that time as a real-estate development tycoon, “did bully his way into the movie”, Columbus told Business Insider, describing how the cameo was on top of a fee. He claimed Trump told him: “The only way you can use the Plaza is if I’m in the movie.”
In late 2023, less than a year before he became president for the second time, Trump went on his Truth Social platform and accused Columbus of lying. He said Columbus’s team was “begging” him to make a cameo and that it ended up being “great for the movie”.
Columbus opted against immediately responding to those claims from Trump. Yet in Monday’s interview, the director made it a point to say: “I’m not lying … 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.”
According to Columbus, his instinct was to cut the cameo and regrets that he changed his mind after viewers at a screening in Chicago “cheered … and cheered and … thought it was hilarious”.
“I never thought that was going to be considered hilarious,” Columbus said, referring to the seven-second scene in which Trump gives star Macaulay Culkin’s character directions on the Plaza hotel. “It’s become this thing that I wish … was not there.”
The idea of removing Trump from Home Alone 2, which made $359m (£280m) to become 1992’s third highest-grossing film, has been tested before.
Trump supporters complained in 2019 when a version of Home Alone 2 screened on Canadian television removed his cameo. Then, in early 2021, Culkin himself said he was “sold” on the concept of digitally removing Trump from the film.
Columbus’s remark to the Chronicle that he fretted being ousted from the US if he did trash Trump’s cameo alluded to prominent deportation cases being pursued by the White House.
In one instance since he retook the Oval Office, Trump’s administration erroneously deported a man living in Maryland to a mega-prison in El Salvador. And immigration officials under his command have detained academic scholars around the US for deportation proceedings after their support of pro-Palestine protests.
The Trump administration has also sought to punish media figures which it considers to have crossed the president. Trump has demanded $20bn from CBS News in a lawsuit over the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with his opponent in the 2024 election, former vice-president Kamala Harris. He also sued the Des Moines Register over an Iowa election poll that turned out to be inaccurate.
ABC News recently settled a lawsuit with Trump for $15m over incorrectly saying the president had been found civilly liable for raping E Jean Carroll. A jury had actually found Trump “sexually abused” Carroll but had not raped her.
“I can’t cut it,” Columbus – whose other blockbusters include Mrs Doubtfire and the first two Harry Potter films – reportedly said of Trump’s cameo.
“If I cut it, I’ll probably be sent out of this country. I’ll be considered sort of not fit to live in the United States.”
