Adam and Mack Make a Movie

Down the DIY rabbit hole with a cult-favorite downtown musician turned filmmaker and his former-child-star best friend.

- Alexis Swerdloff

"I had some friends over last night,” Macaulay Culkin says, apologizing for the fact that his massive, sun-filled lowerBroadway loft is in a state of slight disarray. Barefoot and clad in a red-and-white plaid button-down and worn-in jeans, his long blond hair hanging down to his chest, he pitter-patters down a hall and returns wearing a pair of bunny ears. “Easter’s the one time of the year when you can buy bunny ears, so you gotta stock up,” he says.

In some corners of the internet, Culkin’s existence is almost Easter bunny mythical. But actually, he’s sitting right here, lighting a cigarette, taking off his furry ears, putting his hair into a man-bun. He suggests we take a seat at the dining table, which is covered in a mess of objects that, if pieced together, would amount to quite the evening: There are several king-size boxes of crayons, dozens of markers, dice, safety pins, piles of scribbled-on index cards, a stolen airplane-safety card, bottles of WiteOut, bottles of red nail polish, empty cigarette packs, a Ping-Pong ball precariously perched atop a red candle, a mostly empty bottle of tequila, a full bottle of orange Gatorade, a Saturday Night Live photo album (it’s filled with Polaroids from when Culkin appeared on the show in 1991; David Bowie was a musical guest), and a big heap of weathered, variously sized Moleskine notebooks. “I like hosting people,” Culkin says, gesturing at the mess. “I like letting people make themselves at home.”

Culkin bought this apartment when he was 19, back in 1999. “The neighborhood was a lot different. There was a Wiz downstairs. Now everything’s owned by NYU.” Not that he goes out much. “I’ll take walks at two or four in the morning, because there’s nobody out on the streets and it’s easy for me to go unnoticed.”