Jesse Eisenberg on Feeling “Envious” of Kieran Culkin’s Character in ‘A Real Pain’

So I wanted to play the part, and then the first people I sent the script to were Emma Stone, Dave McCarey, her husband, then producer Ali Herting. And the four of us just talked and just realized it would be impossible to direct and then also play this part that’s always such a live wire and kind of jump back and forth. And then now that it’s done and Kieran is playing the part, I realize how lucky I am that it worked out this way.

There must have been some compelling contrasts between being in the home of your ancestors in Poland and also making a movie?

I expected it to be this very cathartic experience. We were literally shooting inside the house that my family left and was taken from in 1939. I was expecting all these really kind of cathartic experiences, and kind of a surprise for me was just how similar it felt to being on any other movie shoot, because the concerns of a movie shoot are so overwhelming, especially if you’re writing, directing, and acting. It just overshadows any kind of emotional catharsis you may have. So for example, there’s a scene where Kieran and I are literally outside the house where my family lived, and the massive problem of the day is that we thought we were going to get rain at five o’clock, but before we thought we were going to get rain there was too much sun in Kieran’s eyes. And so when he was looking up to talk to these strangers, he couldn’t see, and he was squinting. So we had to create this wall of flags so that the sun was not in his eyes, and it took a half an hour out of the day, and I was just going crazy that we lost this half hour. So my concerns were really just movie-oriented, rather than indulging in the emotional catharsis of history.

I love this line: “You’re like an awesome guy stuck inside the body of someone who’s always running late.”

It’s so witty because that’s the one line in the entire movie that I just begged Kieran to redo over and over and over again on set, and then in voiceover later in postproduction, because I wanted it to be a pause in there [before] “and I got to fish that guy.” But Kieran read it as one line, and I was like, “No, no. Trust me, it’ll be funnier.”