Macaulay Culkin went from being Hollywood's highest-profile child star to living a life of almost total seclusion. He's made millions, been married and divorced, and very nearly thrown his career away. Now 23, with a big movie and a potential sitcom, he's growing into a new role: adulthood.

One side effect of emerging from a decade of self-imposed exile is that even the most mundane details of your life will inadvertently sound scandalous. So let's just get the banalities out of the way:
1. Macaulay Culkin, age 23, likes to smoke.
2. He also likes to drink.
3. He also likes to gamble.

I have learned this much about him within three minutes--within three questions--of meeting him, when he tells me that he spent the night before our interview playing poker with a few close pals. "It was one of those games where everyone puts in their money, and nobody leaves until someone has all the chips," he says. "It came down to me and someone else, and so we had to sit there until 7 A.M." On a gray New York City afternoon last December, we are eating lunch at a restaurant within walking distance of his East Village apartment. But had it not been for the timely intervention of his brother Kieran, Culkin might have missed this appointment altogether. "He woke me up by ringing my buzzer. I'm like, 'Thanks, jerk.'"

It would seem strange to say that Macaulay Culkin has become a grown-up version of himself, if that weren't the most accurate way of describing how he looks today. Beneath the up-all-night weariness in his eyes, the unmistakable smell of cigarettes on his breath, a couple of popped pimples on his forehead, remain the trademark features of the boy whose ten-year-old visage is forever fixed in our minds. He's still got the sunny blond hair, the preternaturally glossy lips, the electric blue eyes that marked him for stardom before he could sign his own name. And still deeper, under these superficial traits, lie the scars of an adolescence that no one would ever wish for himself.

Even Culkin's earliest memories bear traces of the two recurring themes of his childhood: a budding ability to entertain and a brewing conflict with his father. "I remember one Thanksgiving," he says with a wryness that borders on theatricality, "my father was about to give a prayer, and he started out, 'God is great, God is good...' and I went, 'Amen! Let's eat!' I thought it was hee-larious. I don't remember eating Thanksgiving dinner that year. I couldn't have been more than seven."

Everyone knows the part of the story that comes next: By the age of eight, Macaulay Culkin, the third of seven children born to Patricia Brentrup and Christopher "Kit" Culkin, was acting alongside Burt Lancaster in Rocket Gibraltar and John Candy in Uncle Buck; by ten, he was starring in Home Alone, which would go on to make $285 million at the U.S. box office and become the highest-grossing comedy of all time; by 12, he was earning anywhere from $5 million to $8 million a movie; by 14, he never wanted to work again.

The oft-stated explanation for Culkin's withdrawal from show business was that his father, who was also his manager, had become abrasive as a representative and abusive as a parent. But as the actor will tell you himself, this was only a symptom of a larger problem: Culkin couldn't take it anymore. "Everyone was always saying, 'That Mack, he's nine going on 40.' No, I'm nine going on ten, and I'm really looking forward to 11. I went from having nothing to do with my life to wanting to have full control over it." The same precociousness that had made him famous was now telling him it was time to hang it up. "They said, 'Do this,' and, 'You're good at that, keep on doing it,' so I kept on doing it," he says. "The next thing I know, people are building an industry around me. People's livelihoods are on the line--I'm nine! 'What are you talking about?' It was a little crazy. I had to get out of there."

But getting out would require a protracted legal struggle, one that began in 1995, when his mother sued his father for sole custody of their children (they were never married), and ended in 1997, when a judge granted control of Culkin's earnings to his accountant and placed him and his siblings in the care of their mother. Culkin has not seen or spoken to his father since the day the suit was resolved. And as far as he was concerned, the constellation of agents, advisers, and handlers who revolved around him could disappear from his universe as well. "It was like, 'That's it, no more,'" he says. "'Hope you all made your money, because there's no more coming from here.'"

Regaining possession of his destiny made it no easier for Culkin to decide what to do with it. "I had made enough money that I could sit around eating Cocoa Pebbles and watching professional wrestling on TV all day, and my kids would still go to college," he says with an alarming degree of specificity. "I chose to be a slacker." For a time, he enrolled in Manhattan's Professional Children's School, partly because he wanted to make some friends his own age, and partly because he appreciated the institution's revolving-door policy for students in show business--or at least pretending to be. "It was so easy to walk in or out," he says. "Just sign 'audition,' 'I have to go to ballet class,' or 'I have to shoot my soap opera.'" But Culkin dropped out of PCS in what would have been his senior year. "It became weird because I wasn't working at all," he says, "and I felt there was resentment from some people who were out there auditioning, trying to nail down these jobs. Not like I could just snap my fingers--Get Marty Scorsese on the phone! It wasn't like that."

Having abandoned both his work and his education, Culkin seemed content with his status as an ironic cult icon, appearing in a 1998 Sonic Youth video for the song "Sunday" and cultivating a circle of celebrity friends many years his senior, including R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe and Jane magazine editor-in-chief Jane Pratt, who was introduced to Culkin at one of Stipe's annual Christmas parties. "He was the most dapper person in the room," Pratt recalls. "At first I wondered if he was old enough to drink, because he looked so young. But the second we started talking it didn't seem weird at all. I felt like his experience was absolutely equal to mine. He was an adult by the time he was seven."

Years ago, Macaulay Culkin learned how to tune out the gawkers who inevitably greet him by slapping their hands to their cheeks and letting their jaws drop in mock horror: He stopped answering to his given name. "People who have known me for long enough know me as Mack," he says. "Mack like the truck. I've programmed my brain: When I'm walking down the street, if someone yells out 'Macaulay,' I don't turn around. I've actually walked by my own family before." Even so, he couldn't completely stop thinking about how he was being perceived by the outside world. "You're always trying to figure out what other people think of you," he says. "Some people think I sit in a closet eating people's souls while doing heroin and pissing on Christmas trees."

By 2000, Culkin was wondering if his life really had become a punch line. "If you were going to write out all the clichés of being a young actor, what are they?" he asks. "Either you're going to lose all your money, you're going to be addicted to drugs, you're going to be gay, or you're going to get married young." He throws up his hands. "Okay, guilty on that count." (His 1998 marriage to actress and fellow PCS student Rachel Miner lasted a little over two years, or one year and 364 days longer than anyone expected.) He had avoided most of the traps that had ensnared any number of his equally adorable predecessors--he stayed away from drugs, and by his own account, he never even set foot inside a club until the age of 20. But he had become a recluse, and that's when he realized he had to get back to the only thing that had ever mattered to him: acting. "There was a reason why I gravitated toward it at such an early age," he says. "I wanted to do it again, but I wanted to do it the right way--so that I owned it."

Yet as he prepared to start working again, he was fearful that his father's scorched-earth negotiating tactics had gotten him blackballed by the industry. "We were kind of a package deal," Culkin says, "because whatever he did reflected directly on me. If he's yelling and screaming to somebody on the phone, it's on my behalf. It doesn't matter whether I'm six or seven years old, 'cause he wouldn't be yelling on the phone if it wasn't for that stupid kid. It wasn't like, 'Hey, Dad, you gotta get me that extra five million dollars.' It wasn't like we sat down and read the contract and I said, 'I need two star trailers instead of one.'"

Instead, Culkin's comeback began on a stage in London's West End, in the play Madame Melville, where he starred as a high school student seduced by a teacher twice his age. "I was really expecting to be roasted out there," he confesses. "But it was thousands of miles away, so if I stunk, only a limited amount of stinkage would have leaked over to the United States." In fact, Melville earned him some of the highest praise of his career. Its London run was immediately followed by a New York staging just two blocks from his mother's apartment, and he could feel his confidence returning.

Back in New York, he began work on his first film in nearly seven years, Party Monster, which cast him as notorious nightlife promoter Michael Alig, who pleaded guilty in 1997 to murdering his drug dealer. As opposed to the multimillion-dollar projects Culkin had previously appeared in, the budget for this indie was minuscule. "We're showing up in Times Square at four in the morning with no permits," he says excitedly, "waiting for the cops to drive by on patrol, and then run out there and shoot our scene and run back before the cops drive by again. This is like some outlaw, underground filmmaking going on."

Party Monster received mostly mixed reviews upon its release in September 2003, and Culkin's flamboyant--if dead-on--portrayal of Alig incited more than a few "Homo Alone" jokes, but it just might be Culkin's favorite of all his movies. "One out of every ten people who recognizes me now will say, 'Hey, I liked you in Party Monster,'" he says. "Even if it's only one in 20, or one in a hundred, it's fulfilling, because that was one of the few things that I decided to do solely for myself."

Culkin's new movie, Saved!, may be his most surprising yet, for the simple reason that it's the first he's made since the '80s for which he isn't receiving top billing. In the dark high school comedy--a sort of post- millennial take on Heathers in which all the villainous popular girls are evangelical Christians--he's just one member of a young ensemble cast that includes Jena Malone, Mandy Moore, and Patrick Fugit. In Saved!, he plays the wheelchair-bound Roland, the film's resident wiseass and agnostic, who makes further waves by daring to date--gasp!--a Jewish girl. Though Culkin professes an aversion to teen comedies, he latched on to this one because it allowed him to satirize "the arrogance of a little high school world," and also because it's being produced by Michael Stipe. "Mack doesn't really have to shout to break stereotype," says Stipe. "His subtlety and his finesse as an actor convey his message quite well: 'I'm an adult, I'm smart, take me for who I am.'"

At the same time, Culkin can't deny the pleasure of working with people his own age--of being allowed to behave like an overgrown kid. "It felt like summer camp," he says of the shoot. "Me and Jena definitely made it our job to be the corrupters and ringleaders, to make sure everybody had a good time." And what, exactly, does he mean by "corrupters"? "Don't worry," he answers through a smirk. "All good things. Everyone's wiser now." Frequent field trips to perform karaoke and attend Christian events during the production also gave the cast and crew numerous opportunities to get better acquainted with Culkin's girlfriend of the last two years, Mila Kunis, of That '70s Show. "He'll probably kill me for this," says Brian Dannelly, Saved!'s cowriter and director, "but I love that we're at this giant Christian rock concert, and he's making out with Mila. People were horrified, but I thought it was kind of fabulous. It shows he's got a strong sense of himself."

If Culkin's Saved! costars expected him to be aloof or maladjusted, the poised, outgoing young man who instead showed up to the set was a welcome letdown. "The bottom line is he's totally cool with the shit he's gone through," says Malone, who was herself emancipated from her mother at the age of 15. "That's more than I can say with some 40-year-olds, who haven't had nearly as much to deal with, and they're fucking bitter and crazy. He has an understanding of what went down and why, and what he wants to do with it now. That takes balls, and that takes a lot of brains, too."

When Macaulay Culkin drives in Los Angeles--or rather, since he has neither a car nor a driver's license, when someone, usually his girlfriend, is driving him--he is often sighted by other celebrities. Some weeks ago, he was stopped at a traffic light and noticed the wrestler Diamond Dallas Page in the next car over. It's a well-known fact within the pro-wrestling community that Culkin is a fan of their pseudosport, and the two started talking. "He's like, 'A friend of mine just won a celebrity auction!'" Culkin says. "'He gets to go bowling with [Home Alone costar] Joe Pesci, and I'm gonna go with him! You want me to tell him anything?' I'm like, 'Yeah. Tell him...hi.'" Culkin may not be able to keep his past from catching up with him, but at least he's getting better at dealing with it when it does.

It's a routinely balmy day in late March as Culkin and I reconvene on a balcony at Hollywood's Chateau Marmont hotel, where he is chain-smoking Parliaments and brimming with enough energy to keep the town running for a week. Last year he did a guest spot on Will & Grace, as a comically juvenile lawyer representing Megan Mullally's Karen in divorce proceedings; a few months later, he was signing a deal with NBC to star in a sitcom of his own. Now he is weeks away from shooting the pilot, and by the time you read this, NBC will have decided if his show, produced by Conan O'Brien, will join their fall schedule to become the next Friends or if it will become nothing. Ever the gambling man, Culkin compares its odds of success to a roll of the dice. "I'd be surprised if it didn't get picked up," he says, "but I'd be totally surprised if it did."

It's not hard to see why this particular sitcom, presently titled Foster Hall, might appeal to him: It would star him and actress Busy Philipps (Freaks and Geeks) as Clark and Peg Hall, a pair of wicked siblings who spent their formative years bouncing from one foster family to the next and who both did time in prison--and now they've decided it's time to settle down. "It's basically a story about revenge," Culkin explains. "It opens up the door for an endless amount of parents we could have." When I point out to him that Foster Hall would represent the latest in a series of projects, from Home Alone to Madame Melville to Party Monster, in which he has played boys or young men who have been left on their own and forced by factors beyond their control to grow up before their time, Culkin says it's just a coincidence. "It's not like I'm saying, 'Let's find these lost souls for me to play,'" he says. "But I'm sure there's some subconscious thing going on there. Now I'll have to be more aware. Now you've got me thinking."

Speaking of lost souls: At some point, every profile of Macaulay Culkin must eventually address the topic of his boyhood friend Michael Jackson, but when I bring it up, his response is as distant as if I had asked about the time he appeared on The Equalizer. In 2001, Culkin said he wished he had spoken out in Jackson's defense during a 1993 investigation that implicated the King of Pop as a child molester. "I'm still the same person," says Culkin, "and I'd still say the same words." He calls Jackson's current prosecution "a sad situation. But it's going to work itself out." He says that no one from the Jackson camp has contacted him this time. "There's no reason to. I'm so far removed from all that now."

Nor is he concerned that the publicity that comes with starring in a network TV show could possibly lure his father back into his life. "It's something I've got to deal with either way," he says, "whether I do this or anything else. It's something that's always there. But I think I feel equipped enough to handle it now. Otherwise I wouldn't be putting myself in this position."

These potentially painful subjects cannot even faze him, because right now Culkin (who plans to spend half his year in L.A.) is focused on creating a new existence for himself, one in which he and his girlfriend drive and hang out and raise their two dogs together in something resembling normalcy. "If the show goes," he says, "I made her a promise that two years down the line, we'll upgrade the abode in Buy Mode, like in The Sims." More important than the house, though, is the fact that Culkin actually leaves it from time to time. "Every once in a while, I'm in the mood--I'm dressed up, 'Let's go.' Sometimes I'll get dragged out, and sometimes I'll just stay home. I'll be like, 'Just go--go be a girl with your girlfriends! Just don't drink anything weird from any weird guys.'" He exhales a puff of cigarette smoke with a sigh. "I'm such an old man."