How A Real Pain took Jesse Eisenberg on a road trip to his psyche’s ‘ground zero’ - The Jewish Chronicle

Ever since David Baddiel invited Jesse Eisenberg out to lunch during the West End run of the American actor, writer and director’s play The Spoils in 2016, Eisenberg has been aware that to be Jewish in America is a very different thing from being Jewish in the UK.

Not that the purpose of the invitation was to illustrate such a point. Baddiel’s intention was apparently to make a fellow Jewish writer feel at home while away from his native New York.

“He said you should come out and have lunch with my friends,” remembers Eisenberg who, as he shuffles into the hotel suite reserved for this interview, seems bleary-eyed, as if having just woken from a jet lag-induced kip.

(From L-R): Kieran Culkin, Jennifer Gray, Jesse Eisenberg, Kurt Egyiawan, David Oreskes and Will Sharpe in A REAL PAIN. Photo Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures, © 2024 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.[Missing Credit]

He is in London to promote his latest film A Real Pain. A funny and serious sort of buddy road trip, it stars Eisenberg and Succession’s Kieran Culkin as cousins Benji and David Kaplan who travel to Poland to visit the house where their grandmother Doris – a Holocaust survivor – lived as a child. The journey involves joining a small group on a Holocaust tour, the climax to which is a visit to Majdanek concentration camp, which Eisenberg had previously visited in 2008.

With spindly arms protruding from his T-shirt sleeves, the 41-year-old might still be mistaken for a teenager from a distance. He is shorter than one might expect, as is often the case with actors who play leading roles in movies. In Eisenberg’s case these include his performance as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network and the villain Lex Luther in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which was poorly received and about which Eisenberg recently said did his career more harm than good.

“I thought, ‘That is so welcoming and sweet,’” continues Eisenberg about Baddiel’s lunch invite. “[But] I didn’t understand why I was invited until I got there and saw Howard Jacobson and [Who’s Line is it Anyway? creator] Dan Patterson. It was something that had never happened to me in New York. Ever. We were different generations and different media – game shows, novels and, you know, David Baddiel, a multi-hyphenate – and me. It just felt so random until I realised that everybody at this table was Jewish. I guess when you’re much more of a minority you are more likely to stick together and possibly take new people into the fold in a way that feels, you know, welcoming.

“In New York, it [being Jewish] is the water we swim in. Is it a numbers thing here?”

We are now sitting a little uncomfortably in his posh hotel’s absurdly plump armchairs. I say, “The water we swim in here can feel a little like someone else’s pool.” “Right,” he replies, all of which makes me wonder how the hell he will cope with his new Polish citizenship, even though he is keeping his American one.

Eisenberg is disarmingly warm, as interested in interviewers as they are in him and is effortlessly funny through a kind of neurotic Jewish energy that results in comparisons with Woody Allen, who has cast him in two of his films, Cafe Society and To Rome With Love.

He grew up in the suburbs of New Jersey. He remembers when he discovered that not everyone in the world was Jewish and how difficult it was “to wrap his mind around” the startling news.

“I heard about the Holocaust more than any other event in Jewish history. It just became embedded in my memory. As I became curious about how it intersects with my life I would have an immediate guilty backlash — how dare I try to claim pain from it when I didn’t survive anything and it didn’t touch me personally.”

His film is brimful of such guilt. The two core characters are strait-laced David (played by Eisenberg) and the much more charismatic Benji (Culkin), a stoner who had a breakdown after the death of the cousins’ shared grandmother Doris.

Doris is also the name of Eisenberg’s paternal great-aunt, and when David and Benji find their Doris’s house in Krasnystaw, it is the actual house in which Eisenberg’s Doris spent the first few years of her life.

That day of filming was “potentially full of emotional catharses and epiphanies”. Yet the usual pressures of making a film on location provided plenty of distraction.

“We were able to shoot until 7pm but we knew it was going to rain at 5.30; the light was in my and Kieran’s eyes so we spent half an hour putting up a flag to block the sun and then we lost half an hour to meet the mayor of the town, which was lovely but it meant I couldn’t do the shot list during my lunch break.”

Yet during all this Eisenberg was hyper-aware of his connection to the house on whose doorstep his characters lay pebbles like a Jewish tombstone.

“My family lived there. They were dragged out of the house in 1939 and were shot at the cemetery around the corner, which happened to be across the street from where our trailers were parked,” says Eisenberg.

That day must have been one of the few times a Hollywood writer/director felt first-hand the emotions experienced by the characters he created. Yet it is Culkin’s performance in the movie that has been acclaimed and already spoken of as an Oscar contender.

In one powerful scene, which follows the camp visit during which they stand in Majdanek’s gas chamber with its walls stained blue from Zyklon B, the camera tracks across the faces of each member of the tour group, which includes a recent divorcee called Marcia played by Jennifer Grey, as their coach beetles its way back to town. All are in a state of deadpan silence. All, that is, except Culkin’s Benji who is sobbing his heart out.

Eisenberg had no qualms about casting a non-Jew as Benji. But did Culkin have any about taking the part?

“That was the first thing we talked about,” says Eisenberg. “I told him that from my point of view, this is my story and it is about my family. There’s no one on Earth who could play this more authentically than you, I told him. And he said, ‘Right, what am I supposed to do, only play characters who are 20 per cent Irish for the rest of my life?’

“So I felt because I was in the movie and was writing and directing it, and it was about my family, I felt it gave me the authority to be able to cast somebody who I thought portrayed with nuance and humour the exact kind of role I was picturing in my mind. The way I was thinking about it was that Kieran, this brilliant actor, was giving me, this writer, the incredible gift of being able to tell my family’s story in a way that felt most authentic to me.”

In the film Culkin has the loose-cannon energy the actor is now expected to bring to film sets. He barely rehearsed scenes. It really is as if Eisenberg’s David doesn’t know what to expect next. And still the double act explores the condition of being 21st-century Jews who are generationally distanced from the Holocaust yet tugged back to its ground zero.

How (on earth) then does a Jewish director approach filming in a concentration camp? “When I got to the point in the script where I had to write the very surreal words: Exterior. Majdanek – Day it just felt so cheap and cheesy. You could do anything there and it’s already dramatic. Anything you do with characters in these buildings in a fictional movie is exploitative.”

The script therefore has a note stipulating that the scene should look and feel very different from the rest of the film. It does. There are no ornamental camera movements. There is no music. In that sense it attempts to address the question with which all visitors to the camps have to grapple: what is the appropriate way to behave? Though Eisenberg is always linking the question back to Doris.

“How is it possible that somebody who survived through a thousand miracles created people like me?” This is a version of the preoccupation he admits is present throughout the films and plays he writes. Is he forever exploring a kind of survivor’s guilt?

“Yeah, it’s survivor’s guilt. That’s great. It’s like survivor’s guilt passed down?” but not, he says in the epigenetic sense, a concept that he says he doesn’t really understand anyway, though he surely does. The neurosis that drives his creativity can be traced to a much less theoretical concept than the way human genes might be moulded by such environmental factors as persecution.

“My mom used to wake me up in the middle of the night and say, ‘Sweetheart! Wake up! Wake up! I had a dream that we were in a boat and it capsized and you were drowning and I couldn’t save you. OK, go back to sleep.’ And then she would leave my room and I’d be awake, terrified. I was raised by paranoid people who were raised by paranoid people,” he says.

Psychologically the result of that upbringing appears to be a double-edged thing that allows him to appreciate all he has – the brilliant career, an apparently loving marriage with his wife Anna Strout, the college sweetheart with whom he has a young son, and perhaps most surprisingly of all that Polish citizenship, a decision that came out of his “obsession” with his family’s history. Perhaps there he will find the answer to the question that motivates him more than any other. “All of my writing has basically been about, why am I lucky and miserable?” he says.

A Real Pain is in UK Cinemas from January 8

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Jewish film