I'll probably be sent out if...': Filmmaker who directed Trump for a 1992 cameo fears deportation

Chris Columbus, the filmmaker behind Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, has expressed regret over Donald Trump’s brief appearance in the 1992 sequel, saying that removing it could spark retaliation from the former president.

In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle published Monday, Columbus, who was born and raised in the US but is of Italian heritage, said the cameo has become “an albatross” and joked, “I’ll probably be sent out. I’ll have to go back to Italy or something.”

The film follows young Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin), who mistakenly ends up in New York City during the Christmas holidays instead of Miami with his family. At one point, he enters the opulent Plaza Hotel—then owned by Trump—and briefly asks a man, played by Trump, for directions to the lobby.

Columbus is set to be honored at the 68th San Francisco International Film Festival on April 26. Ahead of the event, he revisited a debate that initially flared up in 2020.

Speaking to Business Insider at the time, Columbus explained that Trump had made his appearance in the film a condition for granting permission to shoot at the Plaza Hotel. “The only way you can use the Plaza is if I’m in the movie,” Columbus recalled Trump telling him.

Though the production had already agreed to pay a fee to use the property, Columbus said they ultimately accepted the demand. “We agreed to put him in the movie,” he said in the Business Insider interview marking the film’s 30th anniversary.

Trump, who was then best known as a real estate magnate, later disputed that version of events. In a 2023 post on Truth Social, he claimed the director had begged for the cameo and insisted it helped the film’s success. “They were very nice, but above all, persistent,” Trump wrote. “That little cameo took off like a rocket, and the movie was a big success, and still is.”

Columbus declined to respond at the time, but in his latest comments to the San Francisco Chronicle, he said, “I’m not lying… There’s no world I would ever beg a non-actor to be in a movie. But we were desperate to get the Plaza hotel.”

Though his initial instinct was to cut the cameo, Columbus said audience reactions at a test screening in Chicago changed his mind. The crowd, he recalled, “cheered… and thought it was hilarious.” In hindsight, he said, “It’s become this thing that I wish… was not there.”