Celebrity3 min(s) read
Macaulay Culkin faces backlash over 'inappropriate' Halloween costume
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Macaulay Culkin has been criticised online after posting a Halloween selfie that some people interpreted as blackface but was actually green military face paint recreating a famous World War II painting.
The Home Alone star shared the image on social media over the weekend, showing himself in an army hat with dark paint smeared across his face in a deliberate recreation of the 'thousand-yard stare' meme, which itself is based on a 1944 painting by American war artist Tom Lea depicting a grimy US Marine during the Battle of Peleliu.
It did not take long for the comments to split down the middle.
The backlash
Some users accused Culkin of wearing blackface. Others said the costume was tone-deaf regardless of what it was supposed to be, given the number of active conflicts around the world right now.
"It's not blackface, but it's kinda inappropriate and clueless considering how many war conflicts happening in the world today," one person wrote on X.
Another simply called it 'the worst possible choice he could have made this year'.
The criticism spread quickly across X and Reddit, where a thread in the r/popculturechat community drew hundreds of comments debating whether Culkin had crossed a line or whether people were overreacting to face paint that is very obviously green.
The defence
Plenty of people rushed to point out what the costume actually was.
"Macaulay Culkin nailing the thousand-yard stare soldier meme is a top tier Halloween costume," wrote one user.
"It's sad people think this is anything other than the thousand-yard stare," said another.
X's own AI-powered community note stepped in to settle the argument, clarifying that 'the image shows Macaulay Culkin with green face paint recreating the thousand-yard stare meme from a 1944 Tom Lea painting of a grimy WWII US Marine, not blackface'.
The original painting, titled That 2,000 Yard Stare, shows a Marine on Peleliu with a hollow, traumatised expression and a face covered in dirt and grime from combat. It is one of the most recognisable images from the Pacific Theatre and has been turned into a widely used internet meme over the past decade. Anyone familiar with the meme would have recognised the costume immediately. Anyone not familiar with it would have seen a man with dark paint on his face and drawn their own conclusions.
Why the reaction split so sharply
Because it depends entirely on whether you recognised the reference.
If you knew the painting, you saw a clever, well-executed costume that nailed the expression, the hat, and the face paint color.
If you did not know the painting, you saw a 44-year-old celebrity with dark paint covering his face, and you reacted to what that looked like rather than what it was.
The lighting in the photos probably did not help. Green face paint photographed in warm indoor light can look significantly darker than it does in person, which may explain why some people saw it as something it was not.
Culkin has not publicly addressed the response. He did, however, also post a separate Halloween costume in which he dressed as NFL quarterback Joe Burrow, leaning into a resemblance between the two that fans have joked about for years. Burrow responded on Instagram with 'touché, alleged doppelgänger'. That one went over significantly better.