A Real Pain: Jesse Eisenberg on his anticipated film and working with ‘unusual actor’ Kieran Culkin

No one does neurotic quite like Jesse Eisenberg. For someone who has battled an anxiety disorder since childhood, a career in the entertainment industry might seem like a recipe for disaster. But the opposite has been true. Because the trademark twitchy nervousness of his characters is rooted in reality, yet delivered with a light touch, the 41-year-old’s work has frequently found acclaim. This is most notably the case for his breakthrough role portraying Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in 2010’s The Social Network, which earned Eisenberg an Academy Award nomination. So good was that performance that people probably think Zuckerberg is like Eisenberg, rather than the other way around. The actor has increasingly found himself behind the camera, as an executive producer of films such as Vivarium and with his directorial debut in 2022, When You Finish Saving The World. Eisenberg’s latest work, A Real Pain, is arguably his best yet, as a writer, director and actor. The film follows two cousins, David and Benji, played by Eisenberg and Succession’s Kieran Culkin respectively, as they take a guided Holocaust tour through Poland, following in the footsteps of their dearly departed grandma, a survivor of the nazi atrocities. Needless to say (if you’ve seen the previous work of these actors), there’s a classic Odd Couple dynamic at play as the cousins navigate their own personal traumas and the inescapable weirdness of combining the aforementioned atrocities with luxury travel. The source of inspiration underpinning the film is a combination of a few things, but ultimately began 20 years ago when Eisenberg made the same journey to Poland with now-wife Anna Strout to visit the house his aunt lived in before she was displaced by the Holocaust. That experience became a play, The Revisionist, that Eisenberg wrote and performed in off-Broadway in 2013, but subsequent attempts to translate it to the big screen were fruitless. Meanwhile, another project he was working on, about the dynamic between two men travelling to Mongolia together, had also stalled. Then his internet browser helpfully served him an advertisement for Auschwitz tours in which the key selling point was “lunch included” — and everything fell into place. In A Real Pain, Culkin’s Benji rails against the idea historical trauma can be sold with creature comforts, while David is deeply embarrassed when his cousin calls out their fellow travellers. So, where does Eisenberg, who was raised in a secular Jewish household, stand on the issue? “I’m equal parts David and Benji,” he admits in a video call with STM. “Benji resents luxury travel to Holocaust sites, and I totally understand that, and I agree with that to a certain extent. But I also view the other side of it, which is that, you’re not going to lure people to come look at this history by putting them on cattle cars.” There’s one moment in the film when a Rwandan in the tour group talks about his experience with genocide in his home country, and Culkin’s character replies, “Oh snap!”. It turns out you can take the actor out of Succession, but you can’t take Roman Roy out of the actor. And why would you want to? The dynamic between the film’s leads has propelled A Real Pain into genuine Oscar consideration, with pundits tipping nominations for best picture, best original screenplay and best supporting actor (for Culkin). It recently received four Golden Globe nominations, including a best actor in a musical or comedy nod for Eisenberg. “Kieran is a very unusual actor,” Eisenberg says. “He doesn’t want to rehearse. He didn’t want to talk to me about the role. He didn’t want to take notes from me as a director, he just kind of works inside his head. “I would say, after a take, ‘That was really great in the beginning, but can you try to do this other thing at the end?’, and he would say ‘I don’t know what I did. I wasn’t paying attention to it, but if you want to do another take, I’m happy to do another take’. “It was occasionally frustrating, because you just want to make sure the person is on the same page as you and kind of prepared and understands the scene. But on the other hand, it was so great almost all the time that I just thought, ‘This is great. I don’t want to meddle with it, I don’t want to mess with whatever he’s doing’.” The key to A Real Pain is in the title: asking the audience to look at the Holocaust, at the relationship between these two cousins, and at their individual challenges in life, and contemplate what constitutes real pain. At one point Eisenberg’s character declares his pain, compared with what Benji is going through, is unexceptional. It’s a line that cuts very close to the bone. “I’m an anxious person with a family history of depression, but when I actually think that way, my next feeling is ‘How dare you have any sense of self-pity? Look at what other people are dealing with’,” Eisenberg says. “I don’t feel like my problems should suddenly be foisted upon others, because my pain is not exceptional enough. It’s not that interesting, and it’s not that original, and it’s not that big. “That’s how I tend to think, but the movie is not trying to answer any of these questions that I have on my mind, it’s just trying to pose them to the audience.” A Real Pain is in theatres from Boxing Day.