A Real Pain stars Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin talk about finding humor in tragedy

Entertainment Weekly continues its preview of fall releases, and it has recently looked at the upcoming acclaimed Jesse Eisenberg film A Real Pain. The film is directed by Eisenberg and stars him and Succession star Kieran Culkin. The plot synopsis reads, “Mismatched cousins David (Jesse Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) reunite for a tour through Poland to honor their beloved grandmother. The adventure takes a turn when the odd-couple’s old tensions resurface against the backdrop of their family history.” Their family history involves their grandmother’s survival of the Holocaust.

While the plot elements of A Real Pain are heavy, Eisenberg and Culkin talk about how they were able to make a dark comedy from the subject matter. Eisenberg would proclaim, “I became interested in that topic and thinking about the privilege versus trauma and how people like me walk around feeling bad for themselves over petty things when I actually know for a fact that my family suffered existential trauma, and just trying to reconcile how to think about that. So I’ve been thinking about it and writing stuff around this topic for a long time. And then the movie came. I also have a certain taste in World War II movies about Jews, and I guess this movie was also staking a claim on what the tone could be…that you can have an irreverent tone of a movie while still maintaining reverence for the subject.”

The writer-director-star also stated that his ace up his sleeve with finding the balance of the tone was Culkin’s casting. He explained, “The movie really lives or dies on that character. It’s funny, when I was going through actors and Kieran was immediately recommended to me, my first thought was, ‘Wait, does he do comedy or drama?’ And that for me is the answer — that this person can be so funny, but you don’t know them as a comic…. That’s what Kieran brought to it; it’s exactly the tone that I wanted. It can swing from lowbrow comedy to highbrow philosophical discussions in the same scene. Kieran just naturally is able to do that because he’s super smart and he’s super funny, but he has so much feeling inside.”

Culkin admits he was curious about Eisenberg wearing so many hats for this film, “I thought he wrote a brilliant script — I didn’t know he was a great writer. I like him as an actor. So [I thought,] let’s see how he is as a director.” He added later, “A lot of times, for better or for worse, you end up with a director that’s completely in charge of every tiny little aspect of things — which has its upsides and downsides sometimes, depending on the personality — and then there’s also the directors [who make you question,] ‘Who the hell’s in charge here?’” Culkin says dryly, “He wasn’t either of those. He found the balance between the two.”