Joe Pesci suffered ‘severe burns’ filming iconic Home Alone 2 scene

Filming Home Alone 2: Lost in New York was far from smooth sailing for Joe Pesci, who has revealed he actually sustained ‘serious burns’ on set.

The sequel to the iconic Christmas movie follows Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) a year after the events of the first movie, when he accidentally boards a flight to New York City while his family head to Florida for Christmas.

Of course, Kevin runs into criminals Harry (Pesci) and Marv (Daniel Stern) and all sorts of chaos ensues.

But clearly the chaos wasn’t limited to the story, with Joe revealing that he did all the stunts himself in one particularly memorable scene, when Kevin sets Harry’s hat on fire.

‘In addition to the expected bumps, bruises, and general pains that you would associate with that particular type of physical humor, I did sustain serious burns to the top of my head during the scene where Harry’s hat is set on fire,’ he told People.

‘I was fortunate enough to have professional stuntmen do the real heavy stunts.’

Joe appeared in the first two Home Alone movies, and said he’d be hesitant about returning to the role because it would be difficult to ‘replicate the overall innocence of the originals’.

Cinematographer Julio Macat previously opened up to Metro about the stunts on the original Home Alone, recalling the the tarantula that crawled across Daniel’s face.

‘The funnest stunt we did was the tarantula on Daniel Stern’s face,’ he remembered. ‘We went through this whole thing of getting a professional trainer to supposedly train the tarantula, but you can’t train a tarantula.

‘Right before we’re about to film, Daniel Stern says to the trainer, “So you did work with the tarantula, right? It doesn’t have any venom in it, right?”

‘[They said] “Well, we’re not sure whether or not it has venom is, there’s really no way to know…”’

Reassuring…

Meanwhile, Daniel recently opened up about his chemistry with Joe in the film in a new documentary, saying: ‘We were classic characters in a certain way.

‘‘The friendship was fun, the movie was fun, the silliness we both approached in our own way that was comfortable for each of us, and the chemistry kind of clicked.’