Jesse Eisenberg didn't know Kieran Culkin's work. How'd he find his 'Real Pain' co-star?

Jesse Eisenberg was at an impasse. Call it writer's block. Call it a lack of inspiration. Whatever it was, he was stuck.

The actor ("The Social Network") and writer (he has written three plays) was working on a screenplay a few years back based on his own short story about two friends traveling through Mongolia.

"It was not going well," Eisenberg, 41, says with typical if frequent self-deprecation. "I had a great opening and closing, and nothing in the middle."

Then he spotted an incongruous advertisement ? for a Holocaust tour "with lunch," he says with a chortle ? and the proverbial light bulb flickered. That screenplay took a radical turn and became "A Real Pain" (streaming on Hulu and on demand).

The film has scored Eisenberg, the film's director, a nomination for a best original screenplay Oscar, while his co-star, Kieran Culkin, is hoping to add a best supporting actor Academy Award to his recent Golden Globe and Critics Choice awards.

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The movie is deceptively simple yet has complex layers, tackling friendship, family and even mental illness. It is about two cousins, Benji (Culkin) and David (Eisenberg) Kaplan, who try and rekindle a childhood closeness while going on a group tour of Poland (which includes a visit to a concentration camp) and making a detour to find their grandmother's ancestral home. Suffice to say the homecoming is not quite what they imagined.

"Part of the movie came from thoughts I had whenever I traveled," says Eisenberg, bringing up a theme that plays out in the film. "Mostly, they're around how fortunate we all are, yet no one seems to want to talk about that. Do you not eat dinner after seeing Auschwitz because the people there were starving?"

Both of the lead characters in 'A Real Pain' could be Jesse Eisenberg

Where Eisenberg-as-David is uptight yet polite, Culkin-as-Benji is both infectiously friendly yet often needlessly provocative. "I've been both people," says Eisenberg flatly. "My character might seem more similar to me, shy and self-conscious, but the reality is I'm a performer with a dark inner life that I find myself imposing on other people."

In Culkin, he found the perfect foil, someone who was able to bring the right mix of pathos and comedy to what is fundamentally a largely tragic role. Incredibly, Eisenberg was not familiar with Culkin's work, not even his popular star turn during four seasons of HBO's family dynasty drama "Succession."

"It was my sister who saw the scene I wrote where Benji is trying to get everyone in the tour group to pose with giant statues and she said, 'Kieran Culkin would be great for this,' " says Eisenberg. "I wasn't aware of his acting work, but I knew (playwright) Kenneth Lonergan had cast him in two plays, and that for me is the highest validation possible."

His mission with "A Real Pain" was to "make a movie about big themes that didn't feel academic or self-important, with characters who were neither heroes nor victims." Eisenberg, who is Jewish, also hopes the film in some small way puts a needed spotlight on the horrors of the Holocaust. When the two characters and their tour group visit the real site of the German-run concentration camp, it's little surprise no one speaks.

"It would certainly be lovely if the movie could shed a light on that history, especially for those who might be inclined to be skeptical," he says.

Jesse Eisenberg remains 'shocked' that his last film, about Bigfoot, wasn't widely embraced

If you think Eisenberg is over the moon about his Oscar nomination, you don't know Jesse. Let's just say he's skeptically flattered.

"Look, 'Sasquatch Sunset' (his 2024 dialogue-free embodiment of a Bigfoot dad) was one of the three best scripts I've ever read and I was shocked it wasn't the most beloved movie of the year," he says earnestly. "So yeah, I'm surprised by the film industry all the time, including my own successes."

What this Oscar nod does mean to him is amped-up attention on anything he's doing, which at present includes an as-yet-untitled film he's in that goes into production soon. "I think we got a 10% bump up in the film's budget (after the nomination)," he says. "So it's stuff like that, practical advantages versus just the ego stuff."

He's also wrapping up the third installment of the popular magic crime film series "Now You See Me," which provides the actor an escape into a brazen character who is 180 degrees from his real self. "I love those movies, they're so fun and thoughtful and nonviolent, plus I get to be this arrogant performer, which is this thing I wish I was but can never allow myself to be," he says.

Becoming a father was perhaps the most grounding thing Jesse Eisenberg has done

In conversation, Eisenberg is, perhaps a bit like Culkin, almost exactly like the personas we've seen him play in various movies, from the comedy-horror romp "Zombieland" to his star turn as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. He's thoughtful and to the point. There's a polite guardedness to him. When he finishes a sentence, you sense the topic is done.

Eisenberg often does sound angsty. But he finds deep happiness in parenting, along with his producer wife Anna Strout, their son Banner, 7, who makes a brief cameo at the end of "A Real Pain" as David returns home to his New York family after the Poland trip.

"Being a parent solves so many problems," he says. "I mean, you don't want to think of a kid as being something you do for therapeutic reasons, but for me personally, I was before that preoccupied with fantastical nonsense. I'd spend my days worrying about things that were never going to happen, but having a kid, it reroutes your anxieties into real things."

Not that he's a fully changed man.

"I have to add, my wife is a great person, she does a lot of great social work, so she's turning our kid into a wonderful, caring, thoughtful, community-minded person," Eisenberg says. "Which is great because those are not my natural inclinations. Which are mostly about being in the arts and making jokes."

True enough. But, as Oscar winks in the wings, that's paid off pretty well so far.

This story has been updated with new information for clarity.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Jesse Eisenberg is happy but 'surprised' by his 'Real Pain' Oscar nod