Kieran Culkin And Jesse Eisenberg Talk ‘A Real Pain’, ‘Home Alone’ & ‘Succession’ At Tribeca Festival
Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg talked, quipped, traded barbs and compliments and debated process in an hourlong wacky Tribeca Festival conversation tonight, having clearly bonded over A Real Pain. They star as mismatched cousins on a fraught road trip in the buzzy Sundance comedy set for fall release.
Eisenberg (Fleishman Is In Trouble) wrote and directed the film and said he’d never seen Culkin’s work before casting him. Or nothing recent. He acknowledged he’d seen Home Alone 17 times. The 1990 film was Culkin’s first feature. He played a small part alongside his brother, Macaulay Culkin. “I had no idea what the f–king movie was about” at the time, Culkin reminisced.
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“You’re a magical person in my mind, because I don’t think I’ve ever really seen you in almost anything. And then, when I thought about you in the movie, I purposefully didn’t watch anything. And Succession, at the time when I was writing, it was like not as deep as it was now that it’s over,” Eisenberg told the Emmy and Golden Globe-winner who portrayed Roman Roy in the HBO hit.
“So why did you cast me?” Culkin asked.
“You have an intuition about people … I had an intuition about you. And I’d met you a few times.” The first was on the set of Zombieland (2009) when Culkin was dating Emma Stone. “And you said this nice thing … you gave me such a nice compliment, with no ego. I thought, this is the nicest person.” Culkin had praised Eisenberg’s star turn as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network.
Eisenberg exhibited that same super fast, staccato speech tonight, saying he was anxious. Neither of the two had realized that Eisenberg was supposed to interview Culkin at the event, one of Tribeca’s Storytellers sessions. Culkin mocked him – “Is there a question? .. Hey, it took seven minutes but it’s a question.”
“Are you aware of your unusual qualities and presence?” Eisenberg asked him
“What!? What?!”
The conversation did begin to flow. Culkin said Succession changed the way he thinks about his craft. Before the show started ”I really felt like I had a way of doing things .. I wanted to know the whole thing inside-out, know the other characters’ perspectives. And then the show came out and it’s like ‘Okay, we don’t have the next episode, and also we’re going to change that scene’ and I was forced to completely change that. And there was a little panic [but] I found a weird freedom in doing something completely unkown. And I was like, ‘Okay, I actually don’t need to know. Why don’t I just know as much as my character would know at this moment.”
Eisenberg said Culkin remains uptight about some things. The two “spent hours and hours in the costume room, because the shoes that he’s wearing had a sole and he wanted the sole to be thinner.”
“I don’t want to feel like I am wearing a costume … and I don’t know how to articulate why the shoes made me feel like I was wearing a costume,” Culkin said.
Then there was the hummus. “We are at the table doing a scene and … I didn’t know that you’d worry about the hummus. Because in the several weeks leading up to the hummus you didn’t care about anything … and you were so dogmatic about that hummus.”
(Look for a scene with hummus when Searchlight Pictures releases in October.)
“You are a transcendent person to work with, and a frustrating person to work with,” said Eisenberg.
Neither actor watches their performances, agreeing that there wouldn’t be any point.
Eisenberg said The Social Network was the last thing he ever saw, of himself.
He did recall a Wes Craven horror movie where the director asked him to come by the monitor. “He said, ‘Just look at this shot.’ I am walking down a hallway with a shovel for some reason. And he said, ‘Look at your face. You look like you are nauseous.’ And I said, I was scared. And he said, ‘Yeah, to us it looks like nausea.'” (He didn’t name the film but it was likely Cursed, 2005).
Eisenberg said Culkin scratched himself a lot in A Real Pain. “He started doing this thing, and it got big and weirdly pronounced.”
“And it was like, oh sh-t, I wasn’t aware of that,” said Culkin.
“What if I told you I love that you are itching yourself?”
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