Macaulay Culkin believes that now would be a great time to talk about anything bad his friend Michael Jackson had done to him.

But, the former child star says, he doesn’t have anything to tell.

“Look,” Culkin said in a new Esquire interview. “I’m gonna begin with the line — it’s not a line, it’s the truth: He never did anything to me. I never saw him do anything. And especially at this flash point in time, I’d have no reason to hold anything back. The guy has passed on.”

Culkin said Jackson reached out to him after “Home Alone” made Culkin an instant star. Then they were hanging out, doing, essentially, kid stuff: Prank phone calls were one example the actor gave. Neither of the two had a real childhood, said Culkin, 39, because they had fathers who were pushing fame on them.


Regarding assumptions that the child star might have been abused by the late pop star, he said, “If anything — I’m not gonna say it would be stylish or anything like that, but right now is a good time to speak up. And if I had something to speak up about, I would totally do it. But no, I never saw anything; he never did anything.”

Culkin did offer a Jackson-related anecdote that gave insight into the relationship he and the icon shared. He had run into James Franco on a plane, and Franco brought up the documentary “Leaving Neverland,” in which Jackson was accused of sexual misconduct.

"[H]e goes, ‘So, that documentary!’” said Culkin, who had testified in Jackson’s defense back in 2005. “And that was all he said. I was like, ‘Uh-huh.’ Silence. So then he goes, ‘So what do you think?’ And I turned to him and I go, ‘Do you wanna talk about your dead friend?’ And he sheepishly went, ‘No, I don’t.’ So I said, ‘Cool, man, it was nice to see you.’”