No lies detected here.
Tim Curry is being brutally honest about a memory he has from working on 1992’s Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, when he told a fib to Donald Trump’s ex-wife, Ivana.
The film, which is a sequel to the classic 1990 Christmas movie, follows the young and spirited Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin), who mistakenly gets on a plane headed for New York City while the rest of the family flies to Florida. Kevin sneaks his way into a room at the Plaza Hotel and gets up to his usual shenanigans in the building, which was owned in real life by Donald at the time, with Ivana serving as the property’s president.
In a new career retrospective interview with The Guardian, Curry, who played the concierge in the movie, recalled once having to lie to Ivana about her choice of interior decorating in the hotel, where the movie was filmed.
“She knocked on my door and said, ‘Are you happy in your room? Do you like the way it looks?’ And I loathed it actually,” Curry told the outlet.
20th Century Fox; Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty
That wasn’t his only recollection of the Trumps. Curry also remembered the future president being very eager for his then-girlfriend, Marla Maples, to be introduced to the film’s director, Chris Columbus.
“He was very anxious to find Chris Columbus, the director,” Curry explained. “He said: ‘I’ve got to get Marla to meet Chris Columbus because she’s a brilliant actress.’ And I thought: ‘Yeah, I’m sure.'”
Ironically, Donald himself famously has a cameo in the family comedy film, much to Columbus’ current dismay. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle in April, the director said the cameo from the former real estate tycoon has been “an albatross for me” and that he “wishes it was gone.”
The future president appears briefly in the movie, passing by Kevin in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel and pointing him in the direction of Curry’s character.
James Cole, Rob Schneider, Tim Curry, and Dana Ivey in ‘Home Alone 2: Lost in New York’.
20th Century Fox
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“I can’t cut it. If I cut it, I’ll probably be sent out of the country,” Columbus, who has Italian ancestry, quipped. “I’ll be considered sort of not fit to live in the United States, so I’ll have to go back to Italy or something.”
Columbus previously also revealed that Trump only agreed to let production film at the hotel if he could be featured in the movie in some way.
“We paid the fee, but he also said, ‘The only way you can use the Plaza is if I’m in the movie.’ So we agreed to put him in the movie,” Columbus told Business Insider in 2020 in a retrospective celebrating the film’s 30th anniversary.