Macaulay Culkin: ‘My friendship with Michael Jackson made sense’

Macaulay Culkin has insisted his friendship with Michael Jackson was “so normal and mundane”.
The former child star became friends with the late King of Pop after he shot to fame with the release of Home Alone in 1990, when he was 10 years old.
During an appearance on actor Michael Rosenbaum’s Inside of You podcast on Tuesday (15Jan19), Culkin admitted their friendship may have seemed weird on the outside due to the significant age difference and Jackson being “the most famous person in the world”, but it felt totally normal to them.
“He reached out to me because a lot of things were happening, big and fast with me and I think he identified with that,'” he said. “At the end of the day, it’s almost easy to say it was weird or whatever, but it wasn’t because it made sense. At the end of the day, we were friends.”
Culkin then explained that he had more in common with Jackson, who would have been in his thirties, than children at his school as they had both found fame really young, with the music icon joining family group The Jackson 5 when he was only five years old.
“I was a peerless person. 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,” the 38-year-old noted. “For me, it’s so normal and mundane… I know it’s a big deal to everyone else, but to me, it was a normal friendship.”
The actor also recalled how he would prank call people with the Beat It singer, who he described as “hilarious,” “sweet,” and “funny”.
Culkin, who appeared in Jackson’s Black or White music video, was made godfather to all three of the popstar’s children.
Jackson died in 2009 at the age of 50.