Joe Pesci claims he deliberately avoided McCauley Culkin on the set of Home Alone 2 in order to preserve the “adversarial relationship” between the characters.
The Oscar-winning actor starred alongside Culkin as one half of a villainous pair of thieves in the 1990 Christmas classic and its much-beloved sequel, Lost In New York.
In a retrospective on the movies in PEOPLE, Pesci said he found Culkin to be “a really sweet kid and, even at his age, very professional."
However, he admitted that he intentionally limited his interactions with the child star between takes on set in order to "preserve the dynamic between his character, Kevin, and my character Harry."
The Goodfellas actor, famed for his method-acting chops, claimed he did so in order to “maintain the integrity of the adversarial relationship," between the two, and said he "didn’t want it to come across on the screen that we were in any way friendly" while shooting scenes with his young co-star.
In fact, Pesci went so "method" during the filming for the first movie, that he actually injured the young Culkin - and left him with a scar to remember him by.
While filming the scene when Harry and Marv finally get their hands on Kevin, Pesci's character tells the young boy: "I’m gonna bite all your fingers off, one at a time".
However, Culkin recalled on Late Night with Conan O’Brien that during one of the rehearsals, Pesci actually bit his finger and "broke the skin."
"I still have the scar," Culkin told O’Brien, as he smiled at his finger.
Elsewhere in his interview with PEOPLE, the actor claims he would be open to reprising his role as Marv for a "true" sequel to the franchise, but says it would probably be difficult to replicate the innocent aura of the original films.
"While you never say never, I think that it would be difficult to replicate not only the success but also the overall innocence of the originals," Pesci said.
"It's a different time now; attitudes and priorities have changed in 30 years."
As for the other half of the Wet Bandits, fellow actor Daniel Stern says that not a day goes by that someone doesn’t stop and talk to him about the Home Alone movies, and that he loves every minute of it.
“What a way for me to go through my life when people lose themselves to me in that way,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2015.
“It changed my life; it opened doors for people connecting with me, wanting to tell me about the experience they had in their childhood and passing it on to their children, how they celebrate Christmas, how it made them laugh.”
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