Home Alone Star Macaulay Culkin Let Fans Pick His New Middle Name And Won't Belieive What They Chose

Most people go their entire lives without questioning their middle name, even if they don't particularly like it. It sits there on legal documents and birth certificates, rarely spoken aloud, occasionally embarrassing when someone discovers it.

For Macaulay Culkin, the issue wasn't disliking his middle name; it was that he genuinely couldn't remember what it was in the first place.

The Home Alone star, now 45 and keeping a relatively low profile compared to his child actor days, decided this forgotten piece of his identity needed addressing.

Rather than simply looking it up or picking something himself, he did what any modern celebrity comfortable with chaos would do: he asked the internet for help. Specifically, he turned to his website Bunny Ears and invited fans to suggest replacements for whatever his original middle name had been.

What followed was exactly the kind of beautiful disaster you'd expect when you give thousands of strangers the power to permanently alter your legal identity.

The suggestions poured in, some sincere, most absurd, all revealing what happens when you trust crowd-sourced decision-making for something as personal as your own name. Culkin narrowed the options down to five finalists and put them to a public vote, fully aware he'd committed to whatever won.

The result? Well, let's just say it's completely ridiculous and somehow perfectly fitting for someone who's been in the public eye since childhood.

Macaulay Culkin gave fans the chance to choose his middle name

Axelle/Bauer-Griffin / Contributor / via Getty Images

Rather than living with this ambiguity, Culkin decided to start fresh and begged fans to send him 'better options'. The concept was simple: maybe someone out there would suggest something genuinely cool that he could actually use.

After sifting through countless submissions in a post titled 'Macaulay Culkin Needs A New Middle Name', the actor presented his top five contenders:

• Publicity Stunt
• TheMcRibIsBack
• Kieran (after his brother)
• Shark Week
• Macaulay Culkin

That last option, simply repeating his own first and last name, somehow made the final cut alongside tributes to fast food promotions and Discovery Channel programming.

He put all five to a public vote on Bunny Ears, letting his audience decide which would become his official middle name.

His pitch to voters leaned into the absurdity: "Sure, I might have gold-plated watercraft, and chrome-plated invisibility cloaks, but all I want for Christmas is a new middle name. And then you can be all 'Oh, you got your wife a beautiful portrait of your family? Well, I chose Macaulay Culkin's Middle Name.' And they will cry and cry. Don't be the kind of person who cries on Christmas. Be the kind of person that chooses my new middle name."

The Home Alone star couldn't remember what his original middle name was

20th Century Studios

When the votes were tallied, "Macaulay Culkin" dominated with 60,990 votes. As a result, his official legal name was set to be "Macaulay Macaulay Culkin Culkin." You can call it a repetitive masterpiece that sounds like a glitch in the matrix.

On Christmas Day, he confirmed the results on X: "Merry Christmas to me, from all of you! My new middle name has been chosen. You voted, and the winner is clear. My new legal name will be: Macaulay Macaulay Culkin Culkin. It has a nice ring to it (if you like my name)."

Culkin's willingness to let strangers dictate something as permanent as his legal name speaks to either remarkable confidence or a healthy sense of humor about his own celebrity.

The name is certainly memorable, it's weird, and it perfectly captures the strange relationship between celebrities and the public in the internet age. Most importantly, he seems genuinely pleased with it, which is all that really matters.