We have written about the father of Macaulay and Kieran Culkin before, when Macaulay was on the WTF Podcast with Marc Maron several years ago. According to Macaulay, their father, Kit, was “a bad abusive man,” with whom Macaulay severed all contact after his parent’s divorce. Macaulay remains estranged from him to this day.
I am weirdly fascinated with Macaulay Culkin’s father, Kit, and so clearly is Marc Maron, who had Kieran on his WTF Podcast this week. At the outset, Maron said to Kieran, “I know you and your siblings don’t like to talk about your old man, but… ” and then proceeded to talk about Kieran’s father for the next 20 minutes. Kieran, however, was game, and said at one point that it was fun to talk about his father with someone for the first time in years.
Kieren didn’t get into his father’s abuse as Macaulay had, but Kieran echoed something that Macaulay had told Maron about his experiences with his father: “I’m going around the country locked in a room with a man who didn’t like me,” Macaulay had said. Meanwhile, Kieran also didn’t like to be trapped in hotel rooms with his father, but for different reasons. “He’s the kind of guy who doesn’t really bathe,” Kieran told Maron. “One of those guys who, if you try to tell him he stinks, says, ‘I smell human.’ It sounds like I’m exaggerating, but he wouldn’t bathe but maybe once a year, he would take a bath. That is true. He just didn’t bathe.”
Kieran recalls a story, in fact, when his father took a bath while he and his siblings were at school, and “my sister Cody, she was a teenager, she walked in, smelled the air, and said, ‘Eww. Did Dad take a bath?’ And I remember seeing layers of dirt film on the side of the tub. He was just an offensive man.”
Ironically, their father was a failed actor, although Maron wondered if the fact that he didn’t bathe might have contributed to his inability to land a role. “He would have been really good as a homeless guy,” Kieran said. “My mom said, when she met him, she asked him what he did, and when he said he was an actor, she immediately looked at his teeth and thought he must be lying. He had teeth growing in sideways and they were yellow and falling out. He was also afraid of the dentist.”
Kit Culkin sounds like a real character. There are photos of him in his 70s floating around the Internet, which seem to echo Kieran’s description. Kieran, like Macaulay, remains estranged from their father, although Kieran did say that he came and saw him at a Broadway play about six years ago. It was the first time he’d seen his father in 16 or 17 years. “Holy sh*t, you really let yourself get old,” was the first thing that Kieran said to his father.
“I did, Kieran. I did,” he replied with a dead serious tone. Kieran hasn’t spoken to his father since, although Kit Culkin will get a chance to see his son at the Emmy Awards on television early next month, where he’ll be up for Best Supporting Actor in a drama.
Source: WTF with Marc Maron
