Every 90s kid who watched the classic film My Girl growing up probably remembers being traumatized by Macaulay Culkin’s infamous death scene — but one of the movie’s stars has said she wanted to protect young viewers from the devastating plot point.
Jamie Lee Curtis, 67, opened up about her experience filming the hit 1991 family drama during an interview Tuesday on The View and revealed that she called up the film’s executives to take matters into her own hands
“By the way, when I was making that movie, I called the president of marketing at Columbia and I said, ‘Guys, you have a poster of the biggest star in the world, Macaulay Culkin, and this little girl laughing on the cover of the poster.’ I said, ‘You have to put a warning. You have to say [there are] issues of life and death explored in this film,' because this little boy is going to die on film and you're going to see him dead in a coffin and you're going to freak out every child in America!’”
She added: “They did not listen to me and the movie went on to be a big hit, so what did I know?”
The View co-host Whoopi Goldberg chimed in, “That’s not to say they didn’t freak the kids out.” Curtis agreed, saying, “I think today it would have had a warning label.”
Culkin, who was 10 years old at the time, had already become a household name as a child actor who starred in the Home Alone franchise. In My Girl, he played 10-year-old Thomas J. Sennett, an unpopular boy with allergies who met his fate after being stung to death by bees in the movie’s devastating twist. The film starred Anna Chlumsky as Vada Sultenfuss, Thomas’s death-obsessed best friend, and Curtis as the makeup artist at Vada’s family’s funeral home.
Curtis has reflected on her love for My Girl — which became a box office hit grossing $121 million and inspired the 1994 sequel My Girl 2 — multiple times throughout the press tour for her newest movie, Ella McCay, which hits theaters December 12.
The Freaky Friday actor shared a behind-the-scenes look at the throwback movie earlier this week on Instagram, posting a video of herself and her co-stars performing a rendition of “My Girl” by The Temptations.
“I convinced the rest of the cast that we could go shoot this in a little studio and sweet Anna recorded it in a little sound booth. I thought I was the only one with a copy of this. It was a crew gift that we gave to the wonderful group of people that came together to make that wonderful movie. How fun to see you today,” she captioned the post.
