Their love story seems straight out of a romantic comedy with a touch of drama. It tells the story of two actors, now adults, trying to make their way in an industry that remembers them primarily for the phenomenal success they achieved as kids. Two former child stars trying to escape a past as professionally glorious as it is emotionally complex, who end up finding in each other a mirror in which to recognize themselves and, perhaps, even heal.
The first act didn’t get off to a great start. Their first encounter, back in 2014, occurred after a television series was canceled. He, a friend of one of the show’s actors—Seth Green—tried to cheer up those who had just lost their jobs by joking that the show “wasn’t all that great either.” She, the series’ star, didn’t find the comment funny at all and years later confessed that she “didn’t like the guy who made that joke at all.” Three years later, the mutual friend decided to shoot a very low-budget film and asked several of his closest colleagues, almost as a favor, to travel with him to Thailand to film it in just a few weeks. There, that sarcastic actor and the actress whose series had been canceled met again. This time they really got to know each other. They liked each other. And, although their initial plan was to film for just 10 days, they both ended up staying six weeks in Southeast Asia. The shoot turned out to be something more than just a film. Almost 10 years later, Macaulay Culkin and Brenda Song are parents of two children and form one of Hollywood’s most unexpectedly solid, beloved and watched couples.
Their stories, though parallel, differ enormously in scope. While Brenda Song rose to fame as a Disney star in the early 2000s, playing London Tipton in the series The Suite Life, Culkin was simply the most famous child on the face of the earth. His golden hair, blue eyes, and hands on his cheeks transformed the frozen scream from the Home Alone poster into a global icon of Hollywood. My Girl and Richie Rich cemented his status as the biggest child star in history, earning him up to $45 million in five years. Retired at 14 and legally emancipated at 15, Culkin has not only surpassed even the most optimistic life expectancies (“I can’t believe I still haven’t been included in the In Memoriam segment… and I’ve really tried,” he wrote during an Oscar broadcast) but is now enjoying a kind of well-deserved redemption. If for years Culkin was the symbol of how Hollywood could devour a child prodigy, today his story is that of someone who survived the machine, mocked it, and managed to build a quiet life out of the spotlight.
Song has been essential in this process of rebirth. As she confessed, she too had to dismantle “the armor she had put on to protect herself.” The person he showed to the world wasn’t the real Culkin, she maintains, but someone interesting, sensitive, intelligent, and artistic who didn’t let himself be discovered. Their shared, complex past was their point of connection. “I think there was this unspoken understanding that we’ve had certain trauma that we both share that we didn’t even quite realize stems from us being child actors. Certain anxieties or stressors or even triggers that you don’t realize. You don’t realize as a kid, how much that affects you as an adult,” the actress explained on the podcast Sibling Revelry.
After achieving global fame while boys his age were still playing ball, Culkin fell victim to the ambition of his own parents, who were more interested in increasing their bank account than in their son’s well-being. His father, Kit Culkin, a frustrated stage actor, was his manager and the person responsible for Macaulay’s frenetic professional schedule before he had even reached adolescence. Capable of extorting studios to secure the roles he coveted for his son, he ultimately pushed Culkin to the breaking point, and the two remain estranged to this day. When his father separated from his mother, Patricia Bentrup, in 1995, they fought for custody and professional representation of their children (Kieran, now a Golden Globe winner and known for the series Succession, was also already acting at the time). Amid serious accusations from his parents, Culkin obtained a court order barring them from accessing his money and withdrew from Hollywood. At 17 he married actress Rachel Miner, from whom he divorced a couple of years later.
What was to come was no better: in 2004 he was arrested for possession of marijuana and tranquilizers; the same year he had to testify in the trial against his friend Michael Jackson for child sexual abuse, although he claimed he had never experienced anything similar. He seemed destined to become a broken man, but Macaulay has managed to pull through. And, as he himself has acknowledged, it has been largely thanks to Song. “You’re not only the best woman I’ve ever known, you’re the best person I’ve ever known. You’ve given me all my purpose. You’ve given me family. After the birth of our two boys, you’ve become one of my three favorite people,” he said in his speech when he was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2023.
Despite being together for almost a decade and having two children—Dakota, almost 5, named after the actor’s sister who died at 29 after being hit by a car; and Carson, 3—the couple has yet to tie the knot, although they announced their engagement in 2022. They maintain a solid and relatively discreet relationship, though they often appear together on the red carpet and on each other’s Instagram profiles—both boasting three million followers. One of their most recent public appearances was at this year’s Golden Globes—Song, by the way, was wearing a stunning Alaïa design—and another was at the premiere of Zootopia 2, a film in which they both voice two of the characters.
While the couple continues to accumulate film and television projects, with even Disney itself calling on the former child prodigy, Culkin is experiencing a moment of glory with fashion brands, who are reclaiming him as the star he is by seating him in the coveted front row of their shows. This happened, for example, at the recent Paris Fashion Week when he appeared in the Jean Paul Gaultier and Dior shows, the latter being one of the most talked-about shows of the moment thanks to the appointment a few months ago of Jonathan Anderson as the new creative director.
The third act of his career seems, at the very least, stimulating, with the highly publicized series Fallout as his latest release. And, on a personal level, he boasts a reasonably quiet life, two young children, and the feeling of having survived an industry that had condemned him to become a broken toy. Macaulay is no longer home alone.
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