Ammon News - Film-maker Chris Columbus says he has come to regard Donald Trump’s cameo in his movie Home Alone 2: Lost in New York as “an albatross” that he wishes to remove.

But, Columbus added, he fears the president’s administration would deport him if he followed through with nixing the scene from more than 30 years ago.

“It’s become this curse,” Columbus told the San Francisco Chronicle in an interview published on Monday. “It’s become an albatross for me. I just wish it was gone.”

Though born and raised in the US, the San Francisco resident of Italian ancestry said he worried he would “have to go back to Italy or something” if he erased the cameo.

Columbus’s comments – made in advance of a tribute he is scheduled to receive at the 68th San Francisco international film festival on 26 April – revisited a controversy that began in 2020, toward the conclusion of Trump’s first presidency. The director of the first two Home Alone films told Business Insider that Trump’s cameo in the 1992 sequel was a condition of being able to film inside New York’s Plaza hotel, which Trump owned at the time.

Trump, best known at that time as a real-estate development tycoon, “did bully his way into the movie”, Columbus told Business Insider, describing how the cameo was on top of a fee. He claimed Trump told him: “The only way you can use the Plaza is if I’m in the movie.”

In late 2023, less than a year before he became president for the second time, Trump went on his Truth Social platform and accused Columbus of lying. He said Columbus’s team was “begging” him to make a cameo and that it ended up being “great for the movie”. The Guardian