‘Macaulay Culkin is Now 4 Years Older than Catherine O’Hara Was When She Played His Mom in Home Alone’

In December 2021, screenshots of a tweet indicating that former child actor Macaulay Culkin was “now” four years older that Catherine O’Hara when Home Alone was filmed began circulating among Facebook users:

Macaulay Culkin is now 4 year older than Catherine O'Hara was when she played his mom in Home Alone @stephenszczerba

In the screenshot, the Twitter user’s handle (@stephenszczerba) was visible, but the date was not. Text of the tweet read:

Fact Check

Claim: "Macaulay Culkin is now 4 years older than Catherine O’Hara was when she played his mom in <em>Home Alone</em>."

Description: Macaulay Culkin, who starred as a child in the movie Home Alone, is now four years older than his on-screen mom, Catherine O’Hara, was when they filmed the movie.

Rating: True

Rating Explanation: This claim was verified by reviewing the actors’ ages during the time of the filming and current time. Macaulay Culkin was 10 years old when Home Alone was filmed in 1990, and Catherine O’Hara was 36 years old. As of 2020, Culkin is indeed four years older than what O’Hara was during the filming.

Macaulay Culkin is now 4 year[s] older than Catherine O’Hara was when she played his mom in Home Alone

On Twitter, the original post’s timeline was locked to friends and family so that we could not immediately determine whether “now” was in 2021 or some other year.

A reverse image search yielded no matches, but searching some of the tweet’s text returned seven results — two of which were dated entries from meme aggregator iFunny. They were posted on December 25 and 28 2020, which indicated that “now” was likely the same month the tweets were uploaded to that site (and the likely “years older” number was consequently “five.”)

For context, Home Alone is a 1990 Christmas comedy film, starring Culkin as the titular unsupervised child left behind during a family’s holiday vacation; O’Hara played the boy’s harried mother. Home Alone was filmed in 1990 and released in November of that year.

Culkin was born in August 1980, making him 10 at the time of the film’s release and 40 as of late 2020; O’Hara was born in March 1954, and she was 36 at the time of Home Alone’s release. Given that Culkin was 40 in December 2020 and O’Hara was 36 in 1990, he was indeed four years older than O’Hara when she played his mother in Home Alone.

In December 2021, screenshots of the tweet asserting Macaulay Culkin was “four years older” than Catherine O’Hara when she played his mother in Home Alone circulated on Facebook. That tweet appeared to have been posted in December 2020, at which time the proportions were accurate. In 2021, Culkin was 41, and five years older than O’Hara at the time Home Alone came out.