N.J.’s Jesse Eisenberg talks ‘A Real Pain,’ inherited trauma and his family promise

Jesse Eisenberg knew he lost family in the Holocaust, but details were scarce.

As a child living in East Brunswick, the past was always there.

But for Eisenberg, who would grow up to become an actor, writer, director, producer and playwright, the full story was never told.

“No one ever spoke about the war when I was growing up, because my grandfather, my dad’s parents, I think were just racked with guilt that all of their cousins and aunts and uncles had been murdered and they were lucky enough to move to the states, and so no one ever talked about it,” he tells NJ Advance Media, echoing the experiences of so many grandchildren of the Holocaust.

In his new film, “A Real Pain,” Eisenberg goes there and then some.

The movie brings Oscar nomination projections for the multi-hyphenate filmmaker from New Jersey, whose fast-talking, anxious, outwardly agitated vibe has enlivened so many memorable roles, like his big turn as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in “The Social Network” (2010). The performance landed him his first Academy Award nomination at 27.

Eisenberg, now 41, sets “A Real Pain” in his Jewish family’s native Poland, but the movie, which he wrote and directed, is not a period film.

It’s a story that takes place in the present day, following two American cousins on a group Holocaust history tour.

Eisenberg’s character, David Kaplan, works in digital ad sales and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son. He meets up with his explosive, flighty cousin, Benji Kaplan, who jumps off the screen in a striking, dynamic performance from Kieran Culkin.

Culkin, who won an Emmy at the start of this year for playing Roman Roy in HBO’s “Succession,” is now on Oscar prediction lists for Eisenberg’s film, which is a possible contender for best picture and best original screenplay. In January, “A Real Pain” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, where Eisenberg won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for his screenplay’s skillful balance of drama and comedy.

The film, which opened in New York theaters Nov. 1 and is in wide release Friday (Nov. 15), is a road movie and buddy dramedy that broaches heavy themes with a light touch, complemented by bright piano interludes from Poland’s own Frédéric Chopin.

David and Benji, reunited after some time apart, head to Poland to fulfill a wish from their late grandmother. She wanted them to see where she was from, so she left them money for the trip.

Benji, still “in a funk” from losing their grandma — he calls her “my favorite person in the world” — wears his pain on his sleeve, making his chaotic disposition and fraught mental health history a group subject.

“A troubled young man,” surmises one member of the Holocaust tour.

Eisenberg’s David has his own pain from dealing with obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety — he leaves Benji an insane number of voicemails before they meet at the airport — but he keeps it closer to his chest. He says that unlike Benji, he doesn’t feel the need to “burden” people with his pain. On the tour, he often has to apologize for his cousin and clean up after his outbursts.

However, the restless Benji is also charismatic — a showman who thrives on attention from the group.

He loosens them up, gets them moving and thinking, and fosters real human connections. By comparison, the buttoned-up David, who follows social conventions, can seem forgettable, part of the wallpaper.

The interplay and tension between the cousins provides plenty of comedy, but it also speaks to the universal concept of intergenerational trauma and how we cope with the horrors that have touched our families. What does everyday pain mean when held next to the experiences of survivors devastated by such atrocities?

Eisenberg wanted to ask the question.

“The people who were the survivors of my family, they lived in Poland and they would come to New Jersey to visit us, like, every few years,” he says. “And there was this tension in the air that I didn’t understand because I was too young to understand it. So it was really me as the third-generation American kind of looking into all that very uncomfortable stuff.

“It’s because I had enough of a distance that it was more kind of comfortable and possible for me to find out about it. I’ve since gone to Poland many times. I was able to get access to documents from my family’s history. And in a lot of ways, I’m bringing it to their attention for the first time.”

The promise

Eisenberg’s journey to Poland and “A Real Pain” started with a promise to his Great-Aunt Doris.

Then in her 90s, when she was younger, her home was in Krasnystaw — a town outside the city of Lublin in southeast Poland — until the war tore her away in 1939.

“I told her If I ever get a job working in Europe, I promise I will visit that house and take a picture for you,” Eisenberg says. “And so I was working on a movie in Europe, and my wife (Anna Strout, who Eisenberg later married, in 2017) came out to meet me, and we took a two-week journey to get to this place.”

He had been filming the movie “The Hunting Party” (2007) with Richard Gere in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

“In my brain at the time, I was like ‘oh, Bosnia must be right near Poland,’ and it’s not,” he says of the two countries, which are hundreds of miles apart.

But he made it there, and would return.

Not only would he get a photo of Doris’ home, the place that meant so much to her would also wind up on the big screen in a movie that could win an Oscar.

Eisenberg and Culkin filmed at her real former home in Krasnystaw. In the movie, it’s where David and Benji’s grandmother Dory once lived.

“That’s kind of what, in some ways, was the seed for the movie,” Eisenberg says. “Just thinking about going back to where I’m from and trying to have a feeling about it, even though it’s pretty hard to have a feeling about a three-story apartment building … For me, when I finally went to that house, it was not, like, the revelatory emotional experience I thought it might be, and that’s kind of what the movie is, too. There’s a bit of anticlimactic feeling to these characters connecting to their family’s history.”

He filmed the bulk of the movie in Poland with Polish filmmakers, including cinematographer Michał Dymek (”EO,” “The Girl with the Needle”), producer Ewa Puszczyńska (“The Zone of Interest,” “Cold War”) and production designer Mela Melak (”High Life”).

“A Real Pain” filmed at Majdanek concentration camp, a place rarely seen in modern movies, unlike Auschwitz. In the film, the tour group moves silently through the space. No words are uttered — not even from Benji — as they witness the piles of shoes collected from prisoners, and the gas chamber, stained with blue from the Zyklon B gas the Nazis used for mass murder.

“It took eight months of discussions to be able to have access to film there,” Eisenberg says. “And the reason they let us — we were like the first movie to film there — is because they understood what my intention was, which is to make people aware of what this place is — people deny that it exists — and their mission statement … to bring exposure and awareness to this place and to this history.”

“A Real Pain” gives a nudge in the direction of epigenetics — the idea that trauma can affect biology and behavior and be inherited by successive generations.

“I think about it a lot,” Eisenberg says. “I don’t know enough about biology to understand if there is actually something passed down that manifests as anxiety genetically, but it doesn’t even matter … All that matters is that when you’re raised by people who survived a genocide, they’re gonna be paranoid people, and you’re gonna be paranoid, too. And if you’re paranoid in a world that is not at war, then your paranoia becomes linked to things that are not such big deals. Like, ‘I’m paranoid I’m gonna be late to work’ when actually, it doesn’t matter if you’re a few minutes late to work.”

It’s also one answer to a question Eisenberg poses with this film: “how is it possible that we come from these people who miraculously survived and the things we’re worried about are so petty?”

The director spent his childhood in East Brunswick and was born in Queens. He calls two cities home — New York and Bloomington, Indiana, where Strout, his wife, grew up. (They have a 7-year-son named Banner.)

Now Eisenberg has filed the paperwork to commit to Poland, too.

“I have my social security number, but not my passport yet, so I’m somewhere in the middle of being a Polish citizen,” he says. “I really just wanted to reconnect to the country that was our home for so many years. You know, we’ve been American for 90 years, but we were Polish for so much longer, and I had this deep connection with Polish people because of making this movie. And I wanted to try to help relations between Poles and Jews because they’ve been strained for so many years. And part of this movie is trying to do that … It’s a relationship that lasted for so long, and I feel like deserves to be rekindled.”

From teen standout to inspired storyteller

“A Real Pain” is Eisenberg’s second feature film as a director.

He made his directorial debut in 2022 with A24′s “When You Finish Saving the World,” starring Oscar winner Julianne Moore and Finn Wolfhard (”Stranger Things,” “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire”) as mother and son in a story based on his Audible drama of the same name. Moore’s character, Evelyn, works at an Indiana shelter for survivors of domestic abuse and feels disconnected from Wolfhard’s Ziggy, who craves social media stardom and only seems to care about livestreaming his musical performances.

Both that movie and “A Real Pain,” from Searchlight Pictures, were produced by Eisenberg’s Oscar-winning “Zombieland” co-star Emma Stone (”Poor Things,” “La La Land”) and her husband Dave McCary, under their Fruit Tree production company.

Eisenberg — writer, director, producer and star of “A Real Pain” — is a talent whose work has taken him from standout teen performer to Oscar-nominated actor and filmmaker.

He made his TV debut in 1999 opposite Millburn’s Oscar winner Anne Hathaway in the Fox series “Get Real” and his feature film debut in “Roger Dodger” (2002). He went on to roles in Noah Baumbach’s acclaimed movie “The Squid and the Whale” (2005) and “Adventureland” (2009) before becoming a box office draw in movies like the fun horror comedy romp “Zombieland” (2009), reprising his character in “Zombieland: Double Tap” (2019).

In 2010, he earned an Oscar nomination for his blistering, damning performance as Facebook co-founder Zuckerberg in David Fincher’s “The Social Network,” the film that won Aaron Sorkin an Oscar for best adapted screenplay.

He also tried on comic book supervillainy as Lex Luthor in DC’s “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” (2016); worked with Woody Allen in the films “To Rome with Love” (2012) and “Café Society” (2016); and, since 2013, has starred in the “Now You See Me” franchise about a team of slick magicians. Next fall, Eisenberg appears in “Now You See Me 3″ from “Zombieland” director Ruben Fleischer, who lives in Montclair.

The actor returned to TV in 2022 as Toby Fleishman in the FX/Hulu limited series “Fleishman is in Trouble” alongside Claire Danes and Lizzy Caplan.

Since then, he’s starred in “Manodrome” (2023) and “Sasquatch Sunset” (2024), as the male Sasquatch in a Sasquatch family — no dialogue, but plenty of grunts (he was also a producer).

Before making “A Real Pain,” where the backdrop is the history of World War II, he starred in the movie “Resistance” (2020) as Marcel Marceau, a French Jew who was in the resistance and got children to safety during the war before he found fame as a mime.

This isn’t the first time Eisenberg’s writing has reflected on that period of history.

He wrote the 2013 off-Broadway, Poland-set play “The Revisionist,” in which he starred opposite Oscar and Tony winner Vanessa Redgrave, who played his character David’s cousin Maria, a Polish Holocaust survivor. Eisenberg tried to adapt the story for film. It didn’t work out, but he still wanted to make a movie in Poland.

Eisenberg had also tried to adapt a short travel story titled “Mongolia” that he wrote about two friends who take a trip to Mongolia, which was published in the online magazine Tablet in 2017 (”I grew up in New Jersey, which is like the opposite of traveling,” the narrator says).

But ultimately, it was an online advertisement for a Holocaust tour that gave him a workable premise for “A Real Pain.” Eisenberg found the ad’s promise of comfort and carnage particularly jarring.

Learn about the horrors of mass extermination — lunch included.

Uncomfortable truths — and an Oscar contender

In “A Real Pain,” Benji is unnerved by the fact that he’s traveling in the first-class section of a train.

He bristles at the comforts of privilege in the country where his family was so oppressed, where people were forced into cattle cars, taken to labor camps and put to death.

It’s one way the character, and the story, interrogates daily struggles in the larger context of existential terrors.

Those on the tour can write Benji off as an ostentatious person who demands attention, someone who casually calls people “you freaks,” and announces it’s “pee-pee time!” when excusing himself to go to the bathroom (shades of Roman Roy?). But he gives voice to fears and gnawing thoughts, uncomfortable truths others might hide.

“He’s exactly what I wish I was, which is a guy who says what’s on his mind,” Eisenberg says. “He never feels uncomfortable or awkward in his own skin. He’s constantly telling you how he feels, shaming you for not feeling a similar way. He’s also the life of the party. He’s creating everybody’s best day of their lives. I love people like this. But what I oftentimes think about is that people like this, when they’re alone, they’re very, very lonely. And so when you see brief moments of Benji by himself, he’s profoundly lonely and missing something because he can really only exist in the context of groups and manipulating groups.”

Horrifyingly enough for David, Benji even takes the tour guide, James (Emmy nominee Will Sharpe from “The White Lotus”), to task, panning his delivery of historical information as cold and impersonal. David is left to pick up the pieces, but he doesn’t reach into people like his cousin does. Benji leaves a mark — so much so that the ever-patient James is hugely thankful for the chance to reassess his approach.

Eisenberg was open to improvisation from Culkin, 42, who also started as a child actor, making his film debut in 1990 opposite his older brother Macaulay Culkin in “Home Alone” (”Fuller! Go easy on the Pepsi.”).

He was so funny that Eisenberg had to stifle laughs while directing and make sure his reactions weren’t visible on camera.

“When I first started watching him, I guess I was just immediately struck by this guy, this actor, who I had literally never spoken to about the role — we never talked about the character — and he started performing it, and I just remember thinking ‘he’s doing exactly what was in my mind for the last three years,’” Eisenberg says. “He was just to a tee performing every aspect of it, what was charming about it, what was antagonistic about it, what was really sad about it, what was rageful about it, all the stuff that I was hoping would come through with that character.”

Joining Eisenberg and Culkin in the film is “Dirty Dancing” star Jennifer Grey as Marsha, who takes the tour after going through a divorce.

Kurt Egyiawan (”House of the Dragon,” “Beasts of No Nation”), a British actor born in Cameroon, plays Eloge, a survivor of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. The character, who converted to Judaism, is based on Eisenberg’s friend Eloge Butera. After surviving the slaughter as a child, Butera connected with Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in Winnipeg, Canada.

In the film, Eloge is the only member of the tour group to have witnessed mass killing firsthand.

Eisenberg met the real Eloge — “the most interesting person I ever met in my life,” he says — at a wedding in Quebec about seven years ago.

“He felt like he couldn’t relate to anybody that didn’t understand what a genocide was and what the after-effects of something like that would would be,” the director says of Butera’s conversion to Judaism.

The film’s Eloge allowed Eisenberg to broaden the story beyond Europe — “Genocide and this kind of trauma is not exclusive to Jewish experience,” he says. “It’s Rwanda, it’s Cambodia, and unfortunately, many other places.”

Much has happened in the world since he started filming in Poland, including the war in Gaza. Eisenberg spoke with NJ Advance Media less than a week after the U.S. presidential election.

“I made the movie at a very quiet time, globally,” he says.

“I was just hoping to kind of think about how individuals connect to history. The characters are trying to find some connection to something bigger than their average lives, and they’re struggling to find a connection to their family’s past, and as people now watch the movie, probably thinking about those things a little more, a little closer to the surface, maybe it has some resonance that was not part of my original intention. So that’s quite nice.

“Somebody came up to me yesterday, this guy who was in the 60s, with tears in his eyes, and he told me he has very different politics than his cousin, but the movie is inspiring him to call his cousin.”

“A Real Pain,” rated R, runs 1 hour and 29 minutes and is playing in theaters nationwide.