The late actor Tim Curry criticized Trump’s cameo in 1992’s Home Alone 2: Lost in New York months before his death.
Trump and his ex-wife Ivana owned The Plaza Hotel, which provided the movie’s setting. Curry played the suspicious concierge Mr. Hector trying to nab 10-year-old Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) for staying at the hotel alone.
Ivana was managing the hotel when the cast moved in during filming, though she and Trump finalized their divorce earlier that year after Trump’s affair with Marla Maples. Curry wasn’t a fan of Ivana’s taste in interior design.
“She knocked on my door and said, ‘Are you happy in your room? Do you like the way it looks?’” Curry said in an interview with The Guardian last fall. “And I loathed it actually.”
Curry was also skeptical of Trump’s ambitions to put then-girlfriend Maples on screen.
“He was very anxious to find [director] Chris Columbus, the director,” Curry recalled. “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.’”
Columbus confirmed that Trump’s brief cameo—he played himself and told Kevin that the hotel lobby was “down the hall and to the left”—was a condition of filming in The Plaza. Trump has since disputed that claim, saying Columbus had been “begging” him to appear in the movie and that he “didn’t want to do it.”
“What’s going through this guy’s mind?” Columbus said of Trump in The San Francisco Chronicle. “He said I was lying. I’m not lying. He said I begged him to be in the movie, but 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. But it’s there. It’s become an albatross for me. I just wish it was gone.”
Curry died Tuesday at age 80. The iconic actor collected three Tony nominations and spearheaded groundbreaking projects including The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
