NEED TO KNOW
Tim Curry recalls telling a few white lies in the Plaza Hotel.
While looking back at his decades-long career in an Oct. 14 interview with The Guardian, the Home Alone 2: Lost in New York actor, 79, reflected on the encounters he had with Donald Trump and his ex-wife, Ivana Trump, while playing the suspicious Plaza Hotel concierge, Mr. Hector, in the 1992 sequel to 1990’s Home Alone.
To begin, the Rocky Horror Picture Show star found himself lying to Ivana, who was the president and manager of the famed hotel after Donald purchased it in 1988, about her taste in interior design. “She knocked on my door and said, ‘Are you happy in your room? Do you like the way it looks?’ ” he recalled. “And I loathed it actually.”
He also said that Donald was “very anxious” to find Chris Columbus, the director of the film, so he could rave about his then-girlfriend Marla Maples. “He said, ‘I’ve got to get Marla to meet Chris Columbus because she’s a brilliant actress’ ” Curry continued. “And I thought: ‘Yeah, I’m sure.’ ”
The future president made a cameo in the movie when Macaulay Culkin’s Kevin McCallister gets lost in New York City and ends up at The Plaza Hotel, which the real estate mogul owned at the time. However, Columbus, 67, has since told the San Francisco Chronicle that it’s become a “curse” in his career.
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“It’s become this thing that I wish it was not there,” he told the outlet in April. “He said I begged him to be in the movie, but 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.”
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp./Courtesy Everett
He also told Business Insider that Donald found a way to “bully his way into the movie” by telling them that they could only use the hotel if they gave him some screen time. “We agreed to put him in the movie, and when we screened it for the first time, the oddest thing happened: People cheered when Trump showed up on screen,” Curry said in December 2020. “So I said to my editor, ‘Leave him in the movie. It’s a moment for the audience.’ ”
For his part, Culkin, 45, previously seemed to support calls to remove Donald’s cameo from the film just one day before the president’s second impeachment by the House of Representatives in January 2021.
“Petition to digitally replace Trump in ‘Home Alone 2’ with 40-year-old Macaulay Culkin,” one user wrote on X at the time, to which Culkin responded, “Sold.”
