When you make a movie containing as many violent stunts as Home Alone, it stands to reason that the people involved will end up with some bumps and bruises afterward. Cartoonish as those scenes may appear on-screen, somebody has to take the hit, or the fall, or the flame to the head…twice. In the first two Home Alone movies, three main cast members walked away with injuries (that we know of).
Take Daniel Stern, who played the bumbling Wet Bandit robber Marv, for example. While filming the original Home Alone, he gave himself a bloody nose after pulling his head through the doggie door too quickly. As he revealed in a 2015 Reddit AMA, however, the worst injury he sustained was during the making of Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. “There’s a scene where I have to climb a tower of old TV sets, bookcases, and other seemingly simple bits of debris,” Stern said. “I must’ve hit every corner of every chair and table, take after take. When I was getting out of my costume at the end of the day, I noticed a lot of bruising on my legs…and three days later, both legs were purple [from] toes to you know where.”
Stern’s co-star and fellow Wet Bandit Joe Pesci (who played Harry) didn’t come out of Home Alone 2 unscathed, either. Pesci told People in 2022, “In addition to the expected bumps, bruises, and general pains that you would associate with that particular type of physical humor, I did sustain serious burns to the top of my head during the scene where Harry’s hat is set on fire.” For some reason, he did the stunt in question himself. Professional stuntmen were thankfully utilized for the heavier stunts, though, he clarified.
Believe it or not, Macaulay Culkin was the only one who was left with a visible scar from one of the movies. As they were rehearsing the scene in the first Home Alone where Pesci threatens to bite off Culkin’s fingers, Pesci got a little too into character and really bit the 9-year-old Culkin. “I saw his face—and I’ve never ever seen Joe Pesci actually scared,” Culkin remembered recently. “Because he’s like, ‘I just bit a kid.’” According to Stern, an incident like that was the “only time you might see Pesci break.”
Culkin still has a scar on his finger to this day.
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