Home Sweet Home Alone's pranks were no joke, as the cast quickly learned. According to stars Ellie Kemper and Rob Delaney, they had to complete stunt training before they could take on Archie Yates' devious Max Mercer and his house of horrors.
"They were comprehensive. I mean, we started stunt training well before we started shooting, thank goodness," Delaney revealed during a press conference attended by CBR and other outlets. "We were really required to do most of the stunts in the film. Yes, professional stunt people did them as well and if we did a bad job, they edited them in, but they really put us through the paces, which -- frankly -- was shocking to me, because I thought that I would just have to dip in for a humorous rejoinder now and then. But they were like, 'No, we're going to require you to be in the entire film and doing the stunts,' which was scary, educational and really very fun."
"It turned out to be a lot of fun. I hadn't done anything like that before. It was challenging, but also funny and athletic in a way that I wasn't expecting," Kempler shared.
As Delaney pointed out, some of Max's pranks are quite extreme -- and, in his opinion, go beyond childhood antics. "I mean, the stunts and the things that happen to our characters are truly horrible," he explained. "I mean, Max, by definition, what he does to us is torture. I mean, what he does to us is prohibited under the Geneva Convention."
"So in terms of the film Home Alone, we really wanted to have that real danger be a part of what we were doing," he continued. "It was easy to do because you've got projectiles headed at your skull at hundreds of miles an hour falling from great heights, actual fire and ice. So yeah, just making sure that the real peril was a part of this story was important to us."
Indeed, as the result of one prank, Delaney's character Jeff McKenzie ends up with a large bump on his head. The prosthetics used to achieve that look were so convincing, some of his cast members had a hard time even looking at him. "So disgusting!" Aisling Bea recalled. "It was so disgusting."
"It was so gross, looked like a giant pimple," Ally Maki agreed. "Then, in between, he would come over and be like, 'Hey, how's it going?' I'm like, 'I can't take you seriously right now!'"
"It's almost like you want to take a needle [and pop it]," Yates pitched in.
In Home Sweet Home Alone, a young boy finds himself beset upon by two unknown assailants when he is accidentally left home alone while his parents travel overseas. However, unlike the original John Hughes classic from 1990, Max Mercer's antagonists aren't really villains at all. The McKenzies are simply in search of something that belongs to them, and they're willing to do anything to get it back -- even when Max rises to meet that challenge.
Home Sweet Home Alone is now available to stream on Disney+.