Subscribe on Apple Podcasts
“I’m not an interesting person,” Jesse Eisenberg insists early in our conversation about A Real Pain, a movie so good it immediately disproves his claim. As a writer of plays, short stories and now his second feature film (2022’s When You Finish Saving the World was the first), Eisenberg says he’s always trying to write about people who are unlike him. “The process of writing something and writing characters, in my experience, has been trying to figure people out.”
That effort to figure somebody out — even someone you’ve loved your entire life — is one of the many compelling aspects of A Real Pain, in which Eisenberg also stars opposite Kieran Culkin as a pair of American cousins on a tour of Holocaust sites in Poland. Eisenberg plays the straight-laced cousin who, he admits, is much more like himself. Culkin is live-wire Benji, who is “everything David, my character, wants to be. He’s charming, he’s funny, and he doesn’t hold anything back.”
As you might imagine from that description, Culkin steals many of the scenes in A Real Pain, winning over fellow members of the tour group but also creating unbearably awkward moments when the more volatile part of his personality takes hold. Eisenberg calls writing and acting in those kind of tense scenes “the most exhilarating experience in the world.” But as he explains on this week’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast, directing those scenes when you’re also the actor in them is another thing entirely.
Eisenberg, 41, went refreshingly deep with me on the creative process in this conversation, from what it takes to revise your writing enough that you actually like it to why his next project is set in the world of musical theater. Although the New York City-born actor has been famous since he was a teenager, beginning with the 1999 Fox dramedy Get Real, Eisenberg seems to be entering into a fascinating new creative period now that he’s in his 40s — even though, as he freely admits, he doesn’t have the same time he once did to pursue every creative impulse that hits him. He’s got an anthem about South Sudan in him somewhere, once he finds the time.
This week’s podcast also includes a conversation between me and my old Vanity Fair colleague Rebecca Ford about our experience at the annual Governors Awards, the event in which the Academy hands out honorary Oscars and a lot of awards hopefuls find themselves in the same glitzy room. Rebecca and I recap the highlights of the evening, and try to figure out which film is getting the biggest boost by having all their stars out there shaking hands with voters.
