11 Safe Good Guy Actors Who Should Have Played More Villains
9. Macaulay Culkin
Went Bad In... The Good Son Aside from living with Pete Doherty, and doing his level best not to have an actual career (the two factors surely can't be combining well) Way back before Culkin went through puberty and lost his boyish charm (to be replaced by a slightly Tim Burton-like ethereal weirdness,) the idea of the Home Alone star playing a villain (beyond Kevin McCallister's petulance and selfishness) would have been an abomination and intolerable. He was the golden boy of Hollywood, dependable to the extreme if you needed someone to play a Richie Rich, or a Pagemaster's young charge, or even to break hearts by dying from too many bees, and he probably made a good deal out of being nice. But even before he grew up all gawky and odd - and just one year after making Home Alone 2 - Culkin starred in the ill-fated, but under-rated adaptation of Ian McEwan's chilling novel The Good Son, opposite a fresh-faced Elijah Wood. The film was panned, and called irresponsible for putting a child-friendly figure like Culkin in a deeply not-child-friendly movie, featuring infanticide, familial murder plotting and a general sense of unease that is almost painful to endure. Culkin offers a cherubic, creepy performance that climbs under your skin and gives your skeleton a shake, and it's a shame he didn't get offered more roles like this before the wheels so spectacularly flew off his career.
Went Bad In... The Good Son Aside from living with Pete Doherty, and doing his level best not to have an actual career (the two factors surely can't be combining well) Way back before Culkin went through puberty and lost his boyish charm (to be replaced by a slightly Tim Burton-like ethereal weirdness,) the idea of the Home Alone star playing a villain (beyond Kevin McCallister's petulance and selfishness) would have been an abomination and intolerable. He was the golden boy of Hollywood, dependable to the extreme if you needed someone to play a Richie Rich, or a Pagemaster's young charge, or even to break hearts by dying from too many bees, and he probably made a good deal out of being nice. But even before he grew up all gawky and odd - and just one year after making Home Alone 2 - Culkin starred in the ill-fated, but under-rated adaptation of Ian McEwan's chilling novel The Good Son, opposite a fresh-faced Elijah Wood. The film was panned, and called irresponsible for putting a child-friendly figure like Culkin in a deeply not-child-friendly movie, featuring infanticide, familial murder plotting and a general sense of unease that is almost painful to endure. Culkin offers a cherubic, creepy performance that climbs under your skin and gives your skeleton a shake, and it's a shame he didn't get offered more roles like this before the wheels so spectacularly flew off his career.