Have you heard? London Tipton is marrying Kevin McCallister. It’s the crossover of your after-school appointment TV dreams, the joining of two young adult dynasties, Disney shacking up with John Hughes. But first, they have to find a wedding planner.
“Do you not want to marry me?” Macaulay Culkin asks his betrothed, Brenda Song, over lunch. His not-wife of almost a decade giggles at the suggestion. She’s been wearing a ring (bigger than my apartment and also nicer than my apartment) for the past few years. “I’m fine if we don’t,” promises Macaulay—no, please, call him Mack—“I just want to know.”
“We talked about eloping,” Brenda offers as explanation for the delay. “But I was like, ‘If we eloped, my mom would have a heart attack that she wasn’t going to be there....’” Mack shakes his head at the thought of hurting the feelings of his almost-mother-in-law. “I wouldn’t even!”
Somehow, this conventionality—partners who haven’t planned a wedding yet because, god, are you in the mood to plan a wedding?—fits a couple that otherwise seems totally unexpected, like the trick answer to a trivia question. It’s more than a little glitch-in-the-matrix random that Brenda, 36, and Mack, 44, two generation-defining child stars, are now eight years into what really sounds like will be a forever relationship.
Like there is a shared universe between Home Alone and The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, and it’s down the street in a house in the Valley where they live with their two kids. Like Leighton Meester (Gossip Girl’s Blair Waldorf) being with Adam Brody (The O.C.’s Seth Cohen) or Kirsten Dunst being with Jesse Plemons—the smirking surprise of “You two know each other?”
“That the public is like, ‘Wait, they’re together and they have kids?’ Good. That means we did our job,” says Mack. Although, for what it’s worth, the public isn’t the only one raising eyebrows: “There was a point in time where I was like, ‘I must be in a simulation! I have two children with Macaulay Culkin!’” Brenda says, pantomiming her shock.
The couple first met in 2014 at actor Seth Green’s house after Dads, Seth and Brenda’s short-lived FOX sitcom, got canceled. Mack happened to be staying at Seth’s and tried to lighten the mood. It didn’t go...great. “He was trying to be funny about our show being canceled and I was not having it,” Brenda says. They both remember her shooting him enough dirty looks that he left the room. (“She was thoroughly unimpressed by me is what I will say,” adds Mack.)
But Seth brought them back together in 2017 to film Changeland, an indie he directed and shot in Thailand. At that point, Brenda hadn’t been on a date in almost two years, had frozen her eggs, and wasn’t looking for anything serious. Mack was all “Captain Mack Sparrow,” like the debaucherous Pirates of the Caribbean character. “What, two packs of cigarettes a day?” Brenda asks. Mack nods—yes, that and a red-meat diet.
They started playing gin rummy when they weren’t working, and another friend noticed how interested Brenda seemed to be in her costar. “If you’re going to ever have a fling,” Brenda remembers the friend advising, “Mack is a safe person.”
“Mack is very fling-able,” Mack jumps in now.
There were other little signs on that trip, small coincidences that seemed at least lovely if not meant to be. In one of those late-night anything goes, “what if?” conversations, Brenda mentioned that if she ever had kids, she liked gender ambiguous names like “Dakota.” Mack was taken aback. “I was like, ‘I’m going to name my firstborn ‘Dakota,’” he remembers. At the time, it was just a hypothetical, but the name was important to him: Dakota was his older sister who died in 2008.
Mack gave Brenda some of his journals to read in her spare time. They were full of scribbles, some jokey, others emotional and complex. “I saw this person he put out there—it was a product of this armor that he’s put on to protect himself,” she says. “But I could see that that wasn’t really who he was; I could see these glimpses of this really interesting, very sensitive, very intelligent, artistic person that he doesn’t really let show.”
Still, “we were both very hurt in past relationships and kept expectations low,” explains Brenda. And when they wrapped Changeland, she said goodbye with some version of “See you never.” Mack thinks she was projecting. Brenda says he’s probably right.
They kept finding chances to see each other though, soon doing all the dating stuff without really acknowledging it. Brenda had chicken soup dropped off at his house when he was sick and, another time, showed him how to actually do laundry. One night, she cooked him a steak dinner. (“She’s pescatarian,” Mack interjects at this point. “Did you borrow the steak knives?” He describes how it all felt as being continually “punched with her niceness.”)
When she invited him home one Christmas, it was Brenda’s first time bring-ing a partner to her parents’ house. “And I still technically wasn’t a boyfriend!” Mack clarifies. He knew he loved her first. “I’d never felt this way before,” he says. “I believed in her. I mean, I believed in people before, but I believed in her down to my bone marrow. You know what I mean? I put it behind the armor though, behind that shield.”
“Which is so crazy to me because I feel like you were the opposite!” Brenda says quickly. “I feel like it took—”
“Well, again, the armor and stuff.”
She nods. “I know.”
On The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, the early aughts Disney sitcom about twins who lived in a hotel, Brenda was the rich girl who emphasized everything with a cheeky “Yay, me!” She was a captivating teen actor, exceedingly enthusiastic, unbelievably down. The way she spoke then—and honestly now, too—makes everything just seem suddenly available...up for grabs, even. Young Mack was also adorable, obviously, his palms-on-rosy-cheeks Home Alone moment cementing the movie’s legacy as the archetypal tale of a kid allowed to play grown-up for a while.
But while both were wildly charismatic as child actors, their vibes are very different as actual adults. Brenda is eager and chatty, with the curiosity of a psych major (she graduated from the University of California at Berkeley). Mack is curious, too, but quieter, not as forward. She’s more outwardly affectionate. He’s more verbally frisky, punctuating her stories with deadpan comments or callbacks at exactly the right moments. Brenda has a better memory, but Mack might be a better listener. “That’s a 51-49 thing, but I give it to you,” he argues, even though Brenda now wonders if he should get that last superlative by default. “He listens to me,” she says, “and obviously I’m talking all day....”
Brenda is more ambitious, too. She has a part in Gia Coppola’s moody character study The Last Showgirl, starring Pamela Anderson, and on February 27, she’ll be second-in-command to Kate Hudson in Netflix's Running Point, a spunkier Ted Lasso created by Mindy Kaling and set in the world of the NBA. Brenda plays a chief of staff slash close confidant, a spiky hustler who can take down the biggest guy on the Los Angeles Waves (a fictionalized Lakers) with a withering, sharply deployed “Okay.”
“I’ve had to hustle my entire life being an Asian American actress in Hollywood. I’ve just always had to be very proactive,” Brenda says. “But,” she continues, turning to Mack, “I feel like you help me chill out, and I help bring out that [fire] in you.” It’s true, Mack nods his head. He’s worked on and off throughout the years but just signed on for season 2 of the drama Fallout on Prime Video. “Brenda is encouraging in a way I’d never been encouraged before.” (“We’re proud of one another!” adds Brenda.)
He’s done his best to return the favor: When Brenda went back to work postpartum in 2021 to shoot season 2 of Dollface, Hulu’s underrated girl-group comedy, Mack would pack her lunches. He’s become a home chef much more accomplished than the bachelor meals he’d foraged when they first got together. (“We were in New York once and I looked over and he had a Slim Jim and a Mountain Dew. I was like, ‘Oh my god,’” remembers Brenda.)
These days, Mack seems totally happy being the homebody dad hanging with his kids, 3-year-old Dakota and 2-year-old Carson, and his not-yet (but one day! maybe!) wife. He’s proud of the fact that their house is the site of every playdate, that he butts heads with his toddler, that he stalks the halls as “Papa T-rex.” They make it work without a nanny and with help from Brenda’s parents.
Dakota, nicknamed DakDak, is more like Mack. Sometimes they clash, both parents agree, because they’re so similar. Carson has Brenda’s raspy voice, which Mack impersonates for me, speaking as a 2-year-old who talks like he’s the one smoking two packs a day. “But Carson walks on his tippy-toes, like me,” Mack adds. “And DakDak is a stomper,” Brenda says, “like me.”
If the boys don’t know their parents are famous, they certainly know that they are actors. Kinda. They’ve been watching Home Alone together for the past two Christmases. “Dakota thinks that he’s Kevin McCallister,” Brenda says. “And Mack will jokingly ask, ‘Do you remember you did that scene?’ And he goes, ‘Yeah!’” When he asked Dakota if he remembers having blonde hair for the role, Mack shares, his son answered with very funny certainty: “He’s like, ‘Yep, I do.’ Boy, I’m raising a liar,” Mack laughs.
Every day in their household starts with sports. “The first thing she does in the morning,” Mack says, “besides kids, is football.”
“Oh god,” Brenda groans.
“NFL transactions,” he says. “And she knows everything. ‘Did you hear so-and-so expired?’ I’m like, ‘No, not yet. I’m sorry, I’m catching up.’”
That Brenda, a die-hard NBA fan, is now working on Running Point is a dream come true. She has a Lakers championship ring engraved with her name as well as a signed Kobe Bryant jersey. Her dressing room while making The Suite Life contained a giant Kobe cutout. Literally, she says, she had to go to the hospital once because she hyperventilated so much watching a game at home.
“And did they win?” Mack asks.
Brenda throws up her hands. “Yes, of course we did.”
“And still hyperventilated!” they say in near unison.
A little over a year ago, Mack received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame as a celebration of his 40-year career. In the front row were Brenda, Dakota, and Carson. Mack teared up as he thanked Brenda. “You’re my champion,” he said, “the only person happier for me today than I am. You’re not only the best woman I’ve ever known, you’re the best person I’ve ever known. You’ve given me all my purpose. You’ve given me family.”
It was the first time they’d ever appeared publicly all together, and the internet reacted with a collective “Huh?!” After all, the masses never knew how they’d gotten together or how Mack proposed to Brenda with 21 individually wrapped garden gnomes (it’s a long story) or that Mack’s toxic trait is that he never wants to return anything so Brenda has to do Amazon returns “like, twice a week.” Or that Mack picks Brenda flowers and she says she feels spoiled by him, that they play video games in bed, that their old house had an entire LEGO room.
Their intention wasn’t to hide away, exactly. It’s just that at first, they wanted to protect the newness of their relationship as they were trying to figure out what it was. Then it was the pandemic. Then they had one kid and very quickly after had another. (“Our discussion was, ‘We’ll talk about it next year,’” Mack says of the boys being born 15 months apart. “Less than a week later, she’s like, ‘I’m pregnant.’”)
Now they’re finally ready to loudly celebrate love—and celebrate each other—together. Even my little Grinch heart grows a few sizes at the shining-from-the-inside glow of their affection for one another and how excited they are to catch me up on their lore. “This is Mack’s quote,” Brenda says. “This was literally his quote yesterday: He said, ‘Honey, we have to do this cover. It’s for the mantel, for our boys.’”
Adds Mack: “It’s nice to do a love inventory right now. I like hearing nice things about me from you and vice versa.”
Their only regret in all this? That it took them a little while to get together at all. “It took me, what, 37 years? 36 years?” asks Mack.
“But it wouldn’t have happened any other way,” Brenda replies.
They’re suddenly in full When Harry Met Sally mode, the way couples with decades of marriage experience assure you that all the romantic spinning-out is meaningless. “No, but if I met you 10 years earlier...” Mack begins.
Simultaneously: “We would’ve hated each other.”
So here they are, not married but maybe better than married. At 27, Brenda says, she’d had a breakdown over not having found her person yet. “When I met Mack, there was so much more of me that I hadn’t figured out,” she says now. “He made me such a bigger person and I was like, Oh my god. I didn’t realize that there were so many things I didn’t know about myself.”
Now, ironically, their initial roles are reversed. Brenda is the one more protective of their privacy and feeling less urgent about getting married. Mack had to convince her to play house for the day for a magazine cover. “As I said,” Mack says, “I got your back no matter what. I’ll do whatever you say you want to do.”
“I wasn’t putting the onus on her,” he continues, “but at the same time, I was like, ‘No, I want the things that you want. I’m in this to the end, to the very end.’”
Stylist: Brandon Tan. Brenda’s hair: Clayton Hawkins at A-Frame Agency using Sexy Hair and Bellami. Brenda’s makeup: Kristee Liu at Tomlinson Management Group using Nudestix. Mack’s groomer: Anissa E. Salazar. Production: Crawford & Co Productions. Set design: Bette Adams at MHS Artists.
Director of video: Kathryn Rice. Senior producer: Rae Medina. Producer: Phoebe Balson. Associate producer: Jordan Abt. Director of photography: Darren Kho. Cinematographers: Jake Mitchell and AJ Lodge. Sound: Griff Snyder. Editors: Jeff Sharkey and Sarah Ng.