Major Home Alone star reveals his drastic career change after ditching Hollywood – leaving fans of the film shocked

Home Alone star Daniel Stern has revealed his new career after leaving Hollywood.

Stern, who played Marv the burglar in the Christmas classic Home Alone, now lives on a farm and grows tangerines.

Despite being a major face in the beloved film, he now works as a cattle rancher, grows tangerines and works as a sculptor.

He shared a clip on TikTok, which has been viewed more than 2.1 million times, and revealed he was picking and selling the tangerines on his farm.

He said: ‘Hello, as you have discovered, I live on a farm and we grow tangerines here.

‘They came to pick them the other day and I like it when they pick out a container for me and then I juice them, then freeze them and give them away to my friends.

“I just wanted to show you what it’s like, here are our tangerines, there’s my bucket.”

In another video, which has been viewed more than 1.6 million times, he showed off one of the impressive sculptures he was working on.

He captioned the clip: “I thought I’d share this work in progress video of a new sculpture I’m creating. I’m thinking of calling it Dancer On A Chair’

The beautiful artwork showed a woman draped over a chair in a dancing position, wearing a sequined dress.

Many Home Alone fans were shocked to see his life outside the Hollywood spotlight.

One person said: ‘Omg marv!!! I thought you were just an actor and comedian, this is great!

Another said: ‘I had no idea Daniel Stern did sculpture. That’s great.’

Someone else wrote: ‘You’re an artist??? Wow! How wonderful!’

A fourth said: ‘What I like most is seeing famous people doing things normal people do’

In a biography on his website, Stern explained his career change. He wrote: ‘When I was a child I was a terrible student, but I excelled in everything artistic – theater, choir, band, woodshed, metal shop, ceramics, and sculpture.

‘At seventeen I dropped out of high school and moved to New York to become an actor. I got married and became a father when I was 23, and obviously I just had to concentrate on my career in show business.”

‘I’ve made a lot of great films, but there came a point where I missed being away from my family.

‘I decided to stop traveling, stay home and focus on my family and my other artistic passions.

​”The result of that decision is that I have a wonderful family life and this body of work.”

It comes after Stern revealed he had to fight to get a pay rise for the Home Alone sequel.

When the original 1990 Home Alone film became a box office success and a sequel was immediately greenlit, Stern previously recalled that the studios approached him with an offer of $600,000.

In his new memoir Home And Alone, the actor revealed that the offer was double his salary from the first film, but that his co-stars had received millions of starting offers.

He said he asked Twentieth Century Fox for more money because Joe Pesci, who played his Wet Bandits sidekick Harry, was making about $2 to $3 million.

He also wrote in his book that lead actor Macaulay Culkin, now 43, got a sequel deal for $5 million plus 5 percent of gross box office revenue.

Home Alone 2: Lost in New York premiered in November 1992, two years after the first film – which was almost canned before production even began – was released.

Initially, Stern recalled that it took producers six months to make him the $600,000 offer, adding that it was “double my original salary, but not quite the pot of gold I was hoping for.”

He said he asked for more, but decided to continue negotiations with the studios when he heard his co-star more than quadrupled his salary.

‘I asked if that was the same as Joe [Pesci] got, and they said it wasn’t so,” he said.

Stern explained that the studio eventually came back to him with an offer of $800,000, but at that point he had learned that Pesci was getting “somewhere between $2,000,000 and $3,000,000 plus gross percentage of the profits.”

Because he wanted to be paid at least half of what his co-star earned, he did not accept the six-digit number.

When his agent advised him against it and simply accepted the offer, Stern said he fired him.

Looking back, Stern said it was a “proud thing to do,” but said if that was the best his agent could do for him, “he wasn’t very good at his job.”

Stern began negotiating with the studios himself without an agent, asking for both $1.5 million and two percent of the gross profits.

Negotiations took so long that Stern was asked to start filming with the cast before they finalized a contract.

In the end, however, Stern wrote that it all paid off, as he received his requested salary and was offered one percent of gross profits.

“I knew they couldn’t make the movie without me, but I was also insecure since I almost blew it the first time,” he said of how he almost blundered his casting in the first film.

“I didn’t want to be too greedy when I loved the movie and the role so much.”

He told the Los Angeles Times which he ultimately agreed with, because “there are a lot of things that come out of the movies besides money.”

He also talked about how he almost lost his Home Alone role, which he called “one of the dumbest decisions of my show business life.”

He said the six-week shoot was extended to two months at the last minute and when he heard the pay would remain the same, he decided to pull out.

Another actor – later revealed to be Agent Cody Banks star Dan Roebuck – was then cast in the role, but after a few days of rehearsals, the producers asked Stern to return, insisting on the earlier offer.

“I got a call saying they had changed the shooting schedule and now they needed me for eight weeks instead of six,” he explained.

“They asked me to add 33 percent more recording time, so I asked if they were going to increase my salary by the same amount, and they said they wouldn’t.”

Luckily, he was eventually asked to come back and play the role of Marv, one half of the beloved, bumbling and burglary duo.