The friendship between Macaulay Culkin and Michael Jackson was thought of publicly, back in the day, as more of a "friendship." Aside from the endless Home Alone jokes that can, and have, been made about their bond, Culkin insists that their friendship was normal, and he went on Michael Rosenbaum's Inside Of You podcast to set the record straight.
Culkin says that, as a fellow child star, Jackson had a perspective that no one else could have: "he reached out to me because a lot of things were happening, big and fast with me and I think he identified with that." Culkin goes deeper, calling himself "a peerless person," in that "nobody else in my Catholic school had even this much idea of what I was going through and he was the kind of person who'd been through the exact same frickin thing and wanted to make sure I wasn't alone." When he says "exact same" Culkin isn't exaggerating. Not only did the two get astronomically famous at young ages, they also both had fathers that weren't exactly the kindest. Culkin describes his dad: "honestly, he was a mean bastard. He really shouldn't have been a father, to be honest."
As for what it was like to hang out with the king of pop? "He was fucking hilarious...he was charming, fuckining funny, silly. For me, it's so normal and mundane." Even though he knows "it's a big deal to everyone else," Culkin maintains that "to me it was a normal friendship."
Culkin with Mila Kunis at Michael Jackson's funeral, Sept. 3rd, 2009. Harrison Funk/The Jackson Family via Getty Images
