Daniel Stern Nearly Bumbled Away His Role in ‘Home Alone’
The first time he read Home Alone, Daniel Stern knew he wanted to star as one of the bumbling crooks who get their asses kicked by young Kevin McCallister. In his new memoir Home and Alone, Stern says the screenplay made him laugh so hard he got stomach cramps. “From page one, I started to see myself in the role of Marv Merchants,” he writes. “By the time I put the script down, I was determined to get that part!”
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Stern wanted the role so badly that he auditioned for it twice in the same day. He met with director Chris Columbus in his Warner Bros. office, heard Columbus’ vision for the comedy, then performed his scenes multiple times. Stern thought he did okay, but driving home, something clicked. He suddenly felt he understood what Columbus wanted and called his agent, begging for a chance to go back and try out again. Even though everyone told him a second audition was unnecessary, Stern persisted until he got another chance.
“Chris told me later that he had already decided to cast me, and there was no need to come back,” writes Stern, “but I didn’t know that.”
His agent negotiated a good deal: $300,000 for six weeks of work. But Stern had a problem when the studio redid the shooting schedule so he would be required for eight weeks instead of six. Two extra weeks of filming should mean a 33 percent raise, Stern figured, but no one else, not even Stern’s agent, saw it that way.
That led Stern to “one of the stupidest decisions in my show business life” — he quit Home Alone. In fact, the studio hired another actor to begin rehearsing all the physical comedy with Joe Pesci. Stern writes that he immediately began kicking himself for letting his pride get in the way of a dream job.
The good news for Stern? “The gods somehow intervened (and when I say ‘gods,’ I mean Joe Pesci), because after a couple days of rehearsal, I got the call that they wanted me back in the movie and that they would honor the original contract and make the schedule six weeks,” he explains. Stern was so full of regret at that point that he would have filmed for six months.
Columbus wanted the crooks to start out scary so audiences would believe adorable Macauley Culkin was actually in danger. The way Stern figured it, “who better to scare people than Joe Fucking Pesci.” The two worked out a Three Stooges comic rhythm — if Pesci was Moe, then Stern was a cross between Larry and Curly.
He also got into a rhythm with his stunt double, Stern providing the anguished faces and his fall guy taking the physical punishment of tumbling down endless flights of stairs.
That didn’t stop Stern from getting hurt, however. In one scene, all he had to do was stick his face through the doggy-door so that Kevin could shoot him in the mug with a BB gun. “The problem was that my nose is so fucking big that not once, but twice, I clipped it on the frame of the doggy-door when I was pulling my head out and gave myself a bad bloody nose,” he writes. “It’s those little ones you think are simple that will get you every time.”
