It’s been more than 30 years since the release of Home Alone 2: Lost in New York and a lot has changed. The holiday classic, which is among the most successful videos streaming on Disney, follows Macaulay Culkin’s Kevin McCallister as he returns from a family trip, this time to New York. Kevin uses his father’s credit card to live a transitional life of luxury at the Plaza Hotel, where he meets Donald Trump for the now-memorable scene filmed 15 years before Trump became president. How this came to this has been a matter of slight controversy.
Years after Donald Trump first claimed that he was asked to make a cameo in the film and that it wasn’t his idea, the film’s director, Chris Columbus, explained what happened in a recent interview with Vanity Fair. Columbus spoke about making several beloved Christmas videos over the years and was asked about the billionaire’s unforgettable appearance in the Home Alone sequel and whether the outgoing president asked to be in the film at the time.
Columbus proved that this is not the case, but that he did in fact stipulate that the production film at the iconic Plaza Hotel, which Trump owned at the time. Columbus explained:
The only way we could get to shoot in the Plaza Hotel was that Trump had a cameo… So we gave him the cameo. I said to my crew, ‘We’re going to cut this. We can always cut it.’ We ended up previewing the movie. Trump was basically just a real estate celebrity in Manhattan. And he comes onscreen and the place applauds and cheers. So we kept it in. And it stayed in forever.
At the time, Trump enjoyed broader aid as a cultural figure and via his genuine estate contributions to New York City, and no one had explanation why to call for his removal from the Home Alone sequel as d Others did so years later. The mogul’s ownership allowed him to which movie productions were allowed to use it as a setting. Replicating the Plaza in any other way would have been a big challenge for the movie team, as the hotel is one of the maximum iconic in New York and has a unique look. Choosing to movie elsewhere would have absolutely replaced the temper of the movie, so obliging Trump was in the movie’s maximum productive interest.
Columbus noted that over the years, Trump had denied requesting a cameo in Home Alone 2, but the director claimed that was the case. When the 45th president publicly declared that the production was begging him to appear in the film, the filmmaker remained silent so as not to further aggravate the conflict. He said:
Trump said that it was a lie, that he never asked for a cameo, that we begged him to be in the movie. . . . I was about to respond, and my wife said, ‘You know what? Stay out of it.’ It’s like, I’m not going to get in a fight over Home Alone. There are much bigger battles to be fought.
No matter who you choose to believe in this situation, the cameo remained in the film, cemented in cinema history. Trump has proudly given that impression in cameos in several other films, including Two Weeks Notice, Little Rascals and Zoolander. Trump’s regular appearances and media appearances made him a cultural figure far beyond what most New York real estate moguls were. Watching the films in retrospect makes their presence seem even greater, and it’s highly unlikely that such cameos wouldn’t become genuine every time a rerun occurs.
You can revisit Donald Trump’s Home Alone 2 cameo by streaming the movie now with a Disney+ subscription.
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