Daniel Stern Reflects on Joe Pesci Biting Macaulay Culkin in ‘Home Alone’

Daniel Stern admits it wasn’t just the villains in Home Alone to be feared!

The actor, 67, reflected on playing mischievous but mindless criminal Marv in the hit holiday classic while speaking to Entertainment Tonight. Among his memorable moments on the set was when Joe Pesci — who played Marv’s lawless counterpart Harry — bit Macaulay Culkin, who starred as the child protagonist Kevin McCallister.

As the other half of the “Wet Bandits,” Harry was both rash and the brains of their clumsy operation.

In one scene, Harry threatens to bite Kevin’s fingers off — but when Pesci took it a little too far and actually bit the then-10-year-old, Culkin was left with a scar on his hand.

“Joe is wonderful, and I love him — he’s a dear friend,” Stern gushed, before adding, “But he’s a scary dude!”

“He was carrying it all,” he continued. “We were trying in the first movie to try to actually be scary to start with and then you realize we’re idiots.”

Stern told ET that their aim for the movie, which premiered in 1990, was to build up the “fear factor” to set the drama. It then gradually breaks down as Kevin executes his various pranks — like placing a tarantula directly on Marv’s face.

Stern’s assumption that they would use a “great prop spider” for filming was wrong.

“The wrangler told me, ‘he’s not going to bite you, you’ll be fine,'” he said, adding, “So I let him crawl around on my face for about five minutes, just so we both got used to each other.”

The tarantula literally called the shots, Stern said — if it crawled too far to one side of his face, the camera crew just had to wait for it to return to position.

The tarantula was used in the iconic scene in which Marv flings the spider over onto Harry, who is lying on the floor beside him. Marv had one goal — kill the spider — and was totally okay with attacking his partner in crime to do it.

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“I got to hit Joe Pesci with a crowbar, so that was fun too,” Stern said of the moment his character swung at the spider.

Home Alone was — and remains to this day — a “kid empowerment movie,” Stern said, which is why its popularity is still seen 34 years after its release.