Vanessa Redgrave once compared Jesse Eisenberg to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, because of his “inquiring mind.” Seventeen minutes into my recent lunch with Eisenberg, in Chelsea, I had yet to ask him a question, but he’d peppered me with plenty of his own. Where was I from? How did I know So-and-So? Did I get to consult on my New Yorker cartoon avatar? When I first glimpsed him, as I crossed the street to the restaurant, he’d been fist-bumping a postman. “People are so nice if you’re famous, I guess,” he reasoned, sounding apologetic. “Or maybe not. I don’t know.” He glanced at his menu. “What are you going to get?”
Eisenberg wore a hoodie and an Indiana Hoosiers cap, plus a splint on one finger, owing to an injury sustained during “a big stunt sequence” on the set of “Now You See Me 3.” He was abuzz with anxiety and a kind of ambient guilt, which turns out to be his fuel. For more than two decades—he is forty-one but started acting young—his motor-mouthed neuroticism has been his defining quality onscreen, whether as an awkward teen (“Roger Dodger”), a romantic lead (“Adventureland”), a divorced dad (“Fleishman Is in Trouble”), a supervillain (Lex Luthor, Mark Zuckerberg), or a Woody Allen stand-in (“From Rome with Love,” “Café Society”). Along the way, he’s been writing: plays, screenplays, silly songs for his private amusement, and humor pieces for McSweeney’s and The New Yorker.
His new film, “A Real Pain,” which comes out this week, is one that he wrote and directed himself. Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin play Jewish cousins who go to Poland to take a Holocaust tour and to visit their late grandmother’s childhood home. David (Eisenberg) is a high-strung fuddy-duddy with a wife and a kid; Benji (Culkin) is a charismatic stoner with no boundaries and barely concealed psychic wounds. The movie premièred at Sundance, where it won a screenwriting award; it’s already getting Oscar buzz.
In his work, too, Eisenberg is a relentless questioner, especially of moral vanity and his own ostensibly noble intentions: How can you do real good in the world, rather than just catering to the liberal need to seem virtuous? How do you process your ancestors’ pain, much less your own? Shouldn’t we all feel a little more uncomfortable? Our conversation, which covered these riddles of life and more, has been edited and condensed.
Let’s start with the obvious. Did you take a trip to Poland like the one in the movie?
Yeah. In 2008, my wife and I went to pretty much all the sites that the characters go to and wound up at this house in Krasnystaw, where my family lived until 1938. I was standing outside this house and trying to feel something profoundly cathartic, and not. That’s kind of what happens at the end of this movie: the characters finally get to this house and have these great emotional expectations that are just met by a typical-looking three-story apartment building.
Right, it’s anticlimactic. What inspired you to go? Had you always been interested in your ancestry?
When I was seventeen, I was looking for direction, and I found it in my dad’s aunt Doris, who was in her late eighties. She lived until a hundred and six. I went to her house every Thursday, and she became my life mentor. In the movie we call her Grandma Dory, and she’s as we describe: she was blunt, tough, and unimpressed by anything I had to offer that was not from a place of substance. I even lived with her in my early thirties. My wife and I were not together briefly, and I moved into her tiny one-bedroom and slept on her couch, because I needed grounding. She was born and raised in Poland, in the house that we show in the movie. And I told her, “If I ever get a job in Europe, I will visit that house and take a picture for you.”
Once you did, what was her reaction?
I took a picture of the house, went to Kinko’s, and had it blown up with a glossy finish. I thought she would start weeping and realize that her life had come full circle. She just looked at it for a second and was, like, “Oh, yeah, that’s it.”
Again, an anticlimax.
Exactly. From the moment I started investigating her life, Poland as an idea gave me a certain meaning that I was missing. I was living with material security and appropriate antidepressants for the things that ail me. Having a connection to something bigger, something historic, something traumatic, made me feel like I was a real person and not just floating through a lucky life of shallow emptiness.
Do you mean being famous?
No, just being a modern person who has enough money to live comfortably. I just feel embarrassed about that. Sebastian Junger just wrote this book where he talks about being in Bosnia during the war, and he says he was there not as an adrenaline junkie but as a meaning junkie. My wife teaches disability justice, and she teaches at a school for continuing education. She doesn’t walk around with a sense of shame and embarrassment and guilt. She walks around with a sense of: How can I be of service?
In your own writing, you have poked fun at this feeling you have. I saw your play “Asuncion” in 2011, and the line I still remember is when your character says that he wants to go to some famine-plagued part of Africa, because “I thought I could be of use.”
Oh, my God! I can’t believe you remember this shit.
I remember that line because it nails a kind of clueless self-righteousness. But this is also what you’re talking about, what you’re actually searching for.
Yes, because in my attempt to find meaning I find myself indulging in the very things that I find obnoxious. We went to Teresópolis, in Brazil, and we were trying to help with the Red Cross there, because there’d been a flood. But I’m not strong enough to carry the flour bags, so I just become this American liability. I also acknowledge the silliness of somebody like me assuming that their life has some greater purpose, if only I were to find it. Luckily, I’m in the arts, so I can explore that in these creative and ambivalent ways. “A Real Pain” is trying to show these two characters searching for meaning, and they’re not really finding it in the places they’re expecting to. They’re not finding it in a concentration camp, or in seeing their grandmother’s house. They’re actually finding meaning in their very narrow relationship.
I guess, more than anything, I’m just constantly questioning my own—what’s the word?—hypocrisy. And then the irony is that I write about my hypocrisy, and because I write about it and am occasionally lauded for it, it perpetuates the exact thing that I’m trying to avoid. By writing about trying to connect to something real, I get to go to parties for my movie and wear a tuxedo, taking me once again further away from that thing that I’m striving for.
Welcome to awards season! This movie, among other things, is a great film about cousins, and I feel like that’s an underexplored relationship. I Googled “movies about cousins” and the ones I found were “My Cousin Vinny,” “Mary Queen of Scots”—because her cousin was Queen Elizabeth I—and the weirdest one, “The Blue Lagoon.” People don’t remember that those kids were cousins before they got shipwrecked on a desert island and started having sex in a waterfall or whatever.
