Former president Donald Trump’s cameo in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York wasn’t originally in the script. In the beloved 1992 movie, Trump has a brief exchange with Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) in the Plaza Hotel lobby, a moment that, according to director Chris Columbus, was the result of him bullying his way into the film.
Reflecting on the 1992 sequel to his blockbuster Christmas film Home Alone in an interview with Insider last year, Columbus recalled how there was a condition for filming a scene in the Plaza Hotel, which was owned by Trump at the time. Although the film paid the necessary fee to film in the hotel’s lobby, Columbus said there was one caveat: Trump told them, “the only way you can use the Plaza is if I’m in the movie.”
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“So we agreed to put him in the movie, and when we screened it for the first time, the oddest thing happened: People cheered when Trump showed up on the screen. So I said to my editor, ‘Leave him in the movie. It’s a moment for the audience,’” Columbus said. “But he did bully his way into the movie.”
Trump’s cameo in Home Alone 2 is not his only appearance on the big screen. Prior to becoming president, Trump made cameos in everything from Sex And The City to The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air, Ghosts Can’t Do It, Little Rascals, The Associate, and Zoolander. He also filmed a scene for the 1992 film Scent of a Woman directed by Martin Brest, which did not make it into the film’s final version. According to actor Matt Damon, Trump, in the past, required a cameo in films if they wanted to shoot at his buildings.
“The deal was that if you wanted to shoot in one of his buildings, you had to write to him in a part. Martin Brest had to write something in Scent of a Woman – and the whole crew was in on it,” Damon told The Hollywood Reporter in 2017. “You have to waste an hour of your day with a bulls- shot: Donald Trump walks in and Al Pacino’s like, ‘Hello, Mr. Trump!’ – you had to call him by name – and then he exits. You waste a little time so you can get the permit, and then you can cut the scene out. But I guess in Home Alone 2; they left it in.”
Chris O’Donnell, who starred in the film with Pacino, Gabrielle Anwar, and Philip Seymour Hoffman, also confirmed that a Trump cameo was required to film in the hotel. O’Donnell told Conan O’Brien back in 2017 that in script pages explaining that they would be doing a scene with Trump, “it explained to us in that in order for us to film at the Plaza, we had a little walk-on part for Trump and [ex-wife] Marla [Maples].” However, O’Donnell said that Trump’s cameo ultimately “got cut out of the movie.”
