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Macaulay Culkin looked back at one of the most emotional scenes he’s filmed in his career.
During an appearance on the podcast On Film … with Kevin McCarthy, the actor, 45, recalled filming 1991’s My Girl, in which he starred opposite Anna Chlumsky as childhood best friends Thomas Jay and Vada Sultenfuss.
Vada, an 11-year-old girl obsessed with death, experiences heartbreak firsthand when Thomas is attacked by a swarm of bees and stung to death.
Culkin said real bees were used for the filming of the scene. He recalled, “They put this stuff on my fingertips that smelled like the queen bee, so [the bees] were actually attracted to my hands.”
“I wasn’t a threat,” he continued, adding: “They actually released thousands of bees on me.”
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Looking back at the process with “real freakin’ bees,” Culkin said he doesn’t think it could be done nowadays.
“That would not fly today, boy howdy,” he said on the podcast. “They just told me to wave my hands in front of my face, so the bees would get in front of my face, for the camera and all that stuff.”
And despite filmmakers telling him “not to touch anything,” Culkin explained, “At one point, I touched my pants, and boom. They were just attracted to my pants.”
The scene took four takes to shoot. Culkin said he got out of it mostly unscathed, except for getting a single stinger lodged in his neck.
He recalled, however, “There wasn’t any venom.”
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Culkin also said on the podcast that the scene where the two kids jump into a lake on a summer day wasn’t without its own complications.
“They had these trappers. … What they would do is, they would catch the water moccasins, these snakes that were poisonous. They would catch the water moccasins and then cut them into pieces, and they’d use that as bait for the snapping turtles. Then they would take the snapping turtles, cut them up, and use them as bait for the alligators. And I’m just like, ‘What lake are we jumping into? Jeez, have you ever heard of a swimming pool or something?’ ” he explained.
“Like I said, some of that stuff wouldn’t fly nowadays,” Culkin added with a laugh.
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Culkin, who had found fame in Home Alone, opened up to PEOPLE in 1991 about his friendship with Chlumsky, now 44.
“She’s fun to work with because she’s a kid, and kids relate to kids better than they relate to adults,” he said at the time.
Looking back at My Girl in 2022, Chlumsky told PEOPLE, “We didn’t know how to put into words what we were doing back then. It took until I was in my 20s for me to realize it had such resonance. People would say, ‘My best friend died, and I don’t know what I would have done without that movie.’ ”
Of the film’s effect on her own life, the Veep alum added, “We’ve all got something that shaped us, and this is mine.”
