How Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg Bickered and Grieved Their Way Through ‘A Real Pain’

As he got to filming his new movie A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg realized that he and his costar, Kieran Culkin, didn’t exactly work the same way. Eisenberg was embarking on his second feature as a director, and the first in which he would also act; Culkin was playing his first role since wrapping a four-season run on HBO’s Succession, fresh off that creative high. Eisenberg had spent months working on a shot list for their expansive Poland shoot with cinematographer Michal Dymek (EO). He’d exactingly planned out each scene’s marks and blocking. A lot of that ended up scrapped. “[Kieran] is an unusual actor—he works really, really well as a spontaneous actor,” Eisenberg says.

“On Succession, we’d do the whole scene maybe seven or eight times, and then that was it. This was set-up 12 and take 40-something. I’m like, What is this?” Culkin adds with a laugh. “I felt like I was just making a fuss of nothing. He put me in the left seat and I’m like, ‘Why’d you choose that for me?’ I was just being obnoxious.”

Listening to Culkin and Eisenberg helps explain their exceptionally prickly chemistry in A Real Pain, which premieres at Sundance on Saturday. The pair give some of their most nuanced, funny screen performances to date as cousins at very different stages in their lives who travel to Poland together to honor the memory of their late grandmother. They join a sightseeing tour that allows them to bicker and reminisce on the road—with an audience of fellow tourists in tow—while they face their own intergenerational trauma, visiting the Majdanek concentration camp and later their grandmother’s home.

The script’s origins are threefold: a short story Eisenberg had written and was trying to adapt about two guys drifting apart during a vacation to Mongolia, a play he wrote that followed his own impactful visit to Poland, and an online ad he came across that seemed to bring everything together. It read: “Auschwitz Tours With Lunch.”

Eisenberg at the Majdanek concentration camp, taken by his wife, Anna Strout, during their trip to Poland. 

“It’s just the strange irony of being an upper-middle-class suburban American Jew traveling to Auschwitz and still needing to have some of the creature comforts that you have come to expect whilst traveling,” Eisenberg says. “I thought, That’s such a fascinating, ironic, dramatic and also profound juxtaposition between trying to explore the horrors of your family history while also being able to sit first class on a train car and stay at the Radisson.”

This is the tricky tonal balance that Eisenberg strikes throughout A Real Pain, even as production shot at sites of profound horror. “My main goal was to make an unsanctimonious movie set against the backdrop of the Holocaust,” Eisenberg says. “I don’t like the self-aggrandizing tone of these stories about sensitive subjects—it turns me off creatively. Not because I think they’re doing anything wrong, it just is not my taste.” So we have Eisenberg’s David living a yuppie life in New York City and butting heads with Culkin’s Benji, a kind of drifter who masks immense grief with his wit. Their dynamic rings true, and smartly anchors the film’s larger questions about suffering, guilt, and luxury.

Much of those deeper emotional components came from Eisenberg’s own experience in Poland, reckoning with his family and cultural history. The film could shoot in the country thanks to the work of producer Ali Herting, whose connection to the team behind The Zone of Interest brought them to the Polish company Extreme Emotions. “The house that my family fled in 1938—we actually had cameras inside [it] for this lovely shot of the two main characters departing this little town,” Eisenberg says.

Then there’s the matter of the tour experience, discomfitingly familiar to anyone who’s traveled abroad in this kind of regimented, temporary social circle. Jennifer Grey plays one of the people sightseeing with Benji and David, while The White Lotus’s Will Sharpe plays their tour guide. “You’re experiencing these big things on a personal level, and then also sharing this kind of odd social dynamic with new people who are outsiders,” Eisenberg says. Sharpe actually went a little method in playing a guide, learning the ins and outs of the locations his character was presenting. “There’s a lot of improvising on his part and people asking him questions—and he would actually have the answer to it, which was very impressive,” Culkin says. “It did feel like we were on a tour.”

Eisenberg was at Sundance with his debut feature, A24’s When You Finish Saving the World, only a couple years ago; it proved sharply divisive, landing at 62% on Rotten Tomatoes and struggling to find a commercial audience. Eisenberg was still editing that movie while beginning work on A Real Pain; the experience of making and releasing Saving the World informed the process on his next one.

“This is kind of hard learning for me, but I learned not all audiences are going to be in my head. It’s good for me to make things a little clearer and spelled out,” he says. “Sometimes that means stating things that to me are obvious, but to audiences who are not living inside my brain are not obvious. I really love my first movie, but I know some people found there was no way in. I feel awful about that, because to me, it was clear.”

Eisenberg at 25 Plac Maja in Krasnystaw, Poland, a house that belonged to his family before the war and that appears in A Real Pain.

One other shakeup here? Eisenberg actually starring in his own movie. “I would watch a scene back, and my only criticism of the scene would just be my face. And there was nothing you could do about it,” he says. “The nature of the shoot and the nature of my self-hatred made me not watch the monitor so much.” (It helped that his producers, including Herting, Dave McCary, and Emma Stone, took on more of that role.) Culkin says that he and Eisenberg adapted to each other’s styles, but admits that having his main scene-partner also be his director offered a new kind of challenge. “I’d never worked with somebody who I’m doing a scene with who would then say, ‘Cut—hey, here are some notes,’” Culkin says. “That was the weirdest thing. I was like, ‘Hey, I have notes for you too, damn it!’” (Culkin later adds more sincerely of Eisenberg, “He was a really good captain of the ship.”)

Culkin’s live-wire, quietly heartbreaking performance in A Real Pain marks an impressive follow-up to Succession, for which he just won his first Emmy on Monday night. As Benji, he spotted a few lines that he could also imagine Succession’s Roman Roy saying—but otherwise felt like he was wearing very new shoes. “He’s not at all self-aware, but he is self-aware in certain areas, and he has these total missing spots that I find to be really funny. And it’s tragic,” Culkin says. “It’s sad that somebody can be this old, this far along in their life, and just really not know themselves, know how rude they’re being, know their negative qualities.”

The dynamic between Eisenberg and Culkin gives A Real Pain its heartbeat, even as it reaches far beyond the petty, intimate disagreements between two loved ones. To see Eisenberg play opposite that kind of character opens the actor up with surprising poignancy. You sense that Culkin’s sheer energy on set may have opened up his costar as a director too. “I told [Kieran] on the second day of filming,” Eisenberg recalls, “You hear these old stories of these Old Hollywood directors falling in love with their ingenues. And I think I felt that [with him].”

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