Home Sweet Home Alone, a reimagining of the classic Home Alone films, its out on Disney+ this weekend and his hoping to be a new and refreshing entry into the canon.
According to its official description, the film centers on Max Mercer, “a mischievous and resourceful young boy who has been left behind while his family is in Japan for the holidays. So when a married couple attempting to retrieve a priceless heirloom set their sights on the Mercer family’s home, it is up to Max to protect it from the trespassers…and he will do whatever it takes to keep them out. Hilarious hijinks of epic proportions ensue, but despite the absolute chaos, Max comes to realize that there really is no place like home sweet home.”
The film rounded up an ensemble that includes Ellie Kemper, Rob Delaney, Archie Yates, Aisling Bea, Kenan Thompson, Tim Simons, Pete Holmes, original film cast member Devin Ratray, Ally Maki and Chris Parnell.
Shadow and Act recently spoke with Kemper, Delaney, Yates, Bea and Maki about the film, the major changes that this reimagining has when comparing to Home Alone and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, joining an iconic movie series and more.
Bea, who plays the mother to Yates’ character, explained to us that she reimagining is different enough where she wasn’t hesitant about touching a classic film like Home Alone.
“I loved the reimagining because it’s a very different energy,” she said. “And I think of course, anything does run the risk when you’re doing something that is so near something so beloved of like, ‘Well, who’s playing this and what are you doing with that?’ And when it’s a total different character shift, I think the temptation might be to try and make the scenario extremely different, but actually I think the driving energy in the film that makes it a different movie is the character shifts.”
A big change in the film is that the villains….aren’t actually villains or crooks, a huge departure to the previous Home Alone installments.
“It’s more fun to play in the gray areas rather than just somebody who’s perfectly good or perfectly bad,” said Delaney, who explained that he really related to the situation that the characters were put in. “It was sort of easy for me to get into the mindset because I’ve experienced financial duress before, I have a wife and children that I love, I don’t enjoy being forced to move because my house is being foreclosed on [laughs] So, any parent can really sort of understand that. So, if you were told in that situation, ‘Hey, there’s a solution to your problem, it involves some low grade felony and you might not get caught,’ then you’d really be thinking very seriously about doing it. So I just thought about, what if this was happening to me, which is not out of the question, would I break into a house and try to torture a British child and steal a doll back? Yeah, I probably would [laughs].”
Bea also noted that the mother-son dynamic is different than the one that Macaulay Culkin’s Kevin McCalister shared with Catherine O’Hara’s Kate McCalister
“You’ve got the baddies not necessarily being bad,” she added. “The robbers kind of you can see their emotional impetus to go and rob and we don’t exactly have a pure angel who’s just out of the goodness of his heart defending his house. He’s enjoying the pain that he’s inflicting, and then with the mother, she’s not an immediately likable mom, she’s sort of a bit more of a difficult character and you can sort of imagine her at university as well, and I like that the kid and mom have the same energy about them. That for me felt like a sort of fun way to make a movie that would sit in people’s hearts and want to watch, but you’re finding out something new. You don’t know what’s going to happen necessarily with the story this time around.”
Home Sweet Home Alone is streaming now on Disney+.
Watch the interviews below:
