by Gill Pringle
Kieran Culkin was in no mood to fly to Poland for a two month shoot after wrapping up the fourth and final season of award-winning TV series Succession.
Succession’s shoot had gone two months over, which left little precious time to just chill and enjoy the moment.
But there was just something about Jesse Eisenberg’s script for dramedy A Real Pain – which Eisenberg would both direct and co-star in with Culkin – that was irresistible.
“When I saw the schedule, I was like, ‘You know what? I’m out!’” recalls Culkin, echoing the glib nature of his Roman Roy, the most outrageous of Succession’s battling media empire siblings.
After winning multiple awards for his performance in Succession, he was looking forward to a well-earned break with his young family.
“I really tried to pull out for that reason. The kids being like one and three, it would’ve been a nightmare for all of them. There was no payoff. There was no way to figure out how to do it. So, it was like trying to weigh the personal versus the professional. And I went: ‘Well, this is gonna be a nightmare for me personally, so why am I doing this?’” says Culkin, 42.
“But, creatively this was the one I really, really wanna do. So, I did it and I’m really glad I did,” he says of his role in A Real Pain, a story about two cousins who reunite after their grandmother’s death and end up going on a Holocaust tour of Poland.
Eisenberg’s loosely autobiographical story takes an affecting look at the familial dynamic, as the mismatched cousins – Culkin’s Benji and Eisenberg’s David – visit the childhood home of their recently deceased grandmother, a Holocaust survivor.
If Benji is prone to volatility, hitting rock bottom after his grandmother’s death, conversely, he is also the life of the party. In contrast, Eisenberg’s earnest David is a devoted family man with an obsessive-compulsive disorder and a low threshold for embarrassment – which is unavoidable in the presence of his crazy cousin.
A deeply personal story for Eisenberg, who says, “The movie started basically from my curiosity about my family history. My wife and I took a trip in about 2008 to see where my family was from and, more specifically, to visit the house that they all lived in up until 1939 when the war broke out in Poland, of course. We went to this house, and I was just trying to feel something profound. I was standing there for a long time, and people started looking at me, like ‘Why is this person just standing outside this house?’” recalls Eisenberg, 41.
“And just something I always thought about was: ‘Why didn’t I feel more of an immediate connection? Why didn’t I feel more of a connection to my family history even being in a place?’
“This had stayed with me for a long time. And when I started writing this, all those feelings flooded back. Feelings of ambivalence about my family history. Feelings of confusion. Feelings of why I didn’t feel a deep connection to it. Feelings of like, meaninglessness in my own privileged life and lucky, fortunate situation in America, growing up middle class in New Jersey.
“Feeling like, why did I have such a great disconnect to the painful history that my family had been through? This movie was in some ways an exploration of me trying to understand my own modern life in relation to the trauma that my family experienced. That was the spiritual seed,” he says.
Eisenberg’s career as a playwright began in 2011 with his off-Broadway stage play, Asuncion, going on to write several more plays and audiobooks before making his directorial debut two years ago with dramedy, When You Finish Saving the World starring Julianne Moore and Finn Wolfhard.
Returning from that fated trip to Poland, he immediately began writing a play, The Revisionist. “It was about a young man named David who flies to Poland to stay with his second cousin, Maria, who is my second cousin, a survivor of the war. And I performed the play in New York with Vanessa Redgrave, and the play is translated and staged elsewhere now,” he says.
“I always thought it’d be so great to film a movie in Poland. And in fact, I always thought it’d be great to adapt this. But my adaptations were just not good. What worked in the play was that they’re in this claustrophobic setting and forced to confront each other.
“But what works in a movie is not claustrophobic scenes – what works in a movie is a road trip like in this movie, which is about seeing the country. And so, it really just took a while for the story to feel like a feature film rather than a play. Finally, once I realised that this could be the story of these two young men going to Poland to see where their family is from, I realised, ‘Oh, this could be a feature’ – because you can go on the road trip with them and it’ll feel like a full, rich movie,” says Eisenberg.
But once he began thinking about who would play his cousin in the film, he couldn’t stop thinking about Culkin after showing the unfinished script to his sister. “She read it, and she said; There’s only one person on the planet who could play this role – and it’s Kieran Culkin.
“I suddenly remembered that I had met him a few times in person, and even though I wasn’t so familiar with his work, he just struck me as this thing. This incredibly charming, very comfortable with himself, lovable person who also clearly is encumbered with a little bit of sadness and pain. His emotions are on the surface. I just feel so lucky that he did this. It was a real gift.
“This character Kieran plays is basically somebody who just cannot hold anything in. And sometimes, that’s wonderful and charming, and he’s honest – and also appeals to the secretive part of all of us that are thinking something that we would never say,” he says.
Then, of course – as we see in A Real Pain – sometimes it’s just a little bit too much.
“Yes, so sometimes it can appear as just burdensome, indulgent; this need for him to express himself, and kind of demanding that everybody feels the same thing as him. And so, we’re going on this fraught tour, and for example, we’re taking a train through Poland, and we’re sitting first class because the exchange rate allows these middle-class Americans to sit first class on a train through Poland. And he just can’t stand that we’re not trying to experience the pain of our ancestors who would’ve been taking these same train tracks, but to their deaths,” reflects Eisenberg.
If each cousin in A Real Pain expresses their grief in different ways, then Culkin says, “It is about grief. It’s about pain. And anybody that has grief for someone, which is most, knows that there isn’t really a right or a wrong way necessarily.
“Sometimes, a certain way that might work for someone might not work for another person. I think David has always admired and been actually rather jealous of someone like Benji who can just feel things unabashedly.
“Because, if David gets depressed, he’ll take a pill or go outside and do a breathing exercise. But Benji will lay it on someone else and go: ‘Can I have your shirt!?’” he summarizes.
Born to a brood of child actors, Culkin and his siblings were packed off to auditions before the playground, regularly cross-pollinating one another’s projects, Kieran portraying Macaulay’s cousin in Home Alone and its sequel, and also working with brother Rory in Lymelife and Igby Goes Down.
With Culkin’s former girlfriend Emma Stone also signed on as a producer of A Real Pain, she coaxed him into taking the role. “She and I had a phone call about two weeks before we got started, which was mostly her convincing me to do the movie – which she did in a very brilliant way,” he laughs.
A Real Pain is screening at the Jewish International Film Festival, and is in general release from 26 December 2024
