Tim Curry Opens Up About Working with Donald Trump, and Meeting His Ex-Wife, for Home Alone 2

In a recent interview with The Guardian published on Oct. 14, Tim Curry looked back on his long career and shared stories from the set of Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. The 79-year-old actor reflected on meeting Donald Trump and his then-wife, Ivana Trump, while filming the 1992 sequel to Home Alone, where he played the wary Plaza Hotel concierge, Mr. Hector.

Curry recalled that his first meeting with Ivana came with a small white lie. At the time, Ivana was the president and manager of the hotel, which Donald had purchased in 1988. “She knocked on my door and said, ‘Are you happy in your room? Do you like the way it looks?’ ” Curry remembered. “And I loathed it actually.”

He also recounted Donald’s eagerness to meet director Chris Columbus to talk 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 shared. “And I thought: ‘Yeah, I’m sure.’ ”

The future president made a cameo in Home Alone 2 during the scene where Macaulay Culkin’s Kevin McCallister wanders into The Plaza Hotel, which Trump owned at the time. Director Chris Columbus later told the San Francisco Chronicle that the cameo has become somewhat of a “curse” in his career.

“It’s become this thing that I wish was not there,” Columbus said in April. “He claimed I begged him to be in the movie, but there’s no world in which I would ever beg a non-actor to appear. We were just desperate to get The Plaza Hotel.”

Columbus also told Business Insider that Trump managed to “bully his way into the movie” by making his cameo a condition for filming at the hotel. “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 appeared on screen,” Curry recalled in December 2020. “So I said to my editor, ‘Leave him in the movie. It’s a moment for the audience.’ ”

As for Macaulay Culkin, now 45, he previously supported fans’ calls to digitally remove Trump’s cameo from the film. In January 2021, one day before the former president’s second impeachment by the House of Representatives, a user on X suggested, “Petition to digitally replace Trump in Home Alone 2 with 40-year-old Macaulay Culkin.” Culkin simply replied, “Sold.”