Jesse Eisenberg Knows When to Cut the Jokes
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links."
Jesse Eisenberg loved musical theater as a kid growing up in the New Jersey suburbs. At twelve, he told his father, an academic with a Ph.D. in social science, that he dreamed of being in the ensemble of Les Misérables on Broadway—partly to get a rise out of him. Eisenberg’s father, “who is like the nicest person,” according to his son, responded, “Oh, that’s wonderful if you want, but I don’t know if you’d be completely fulfilled.”
Turns out, Eisenberg couldn’t sing or dance, at least not well enough. “My brain was not wired to create musical theater,” he says. It is, though, very much geared toward acting, as we’ve seen over the past couple decades. Eisenberg first came to our attention in The Squid and the Whale (2005), followed by his star turn as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network (2010). He’s done big-budget franchises (Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Now You See Me) and much-talked-about TV (Fleishman Is in Trouble).
Despite that mainstream success, Eisenberg, forty, eschews the traditional Hollywood path. He lives in New York rather than L.A. And he pours his creative energy into writing—everything from humor pieces in McSweeney’s and The New Yorker to four stage plays to, increasingly, movie scripts. The first feature film he wrote and directed, When You Finish Saving the World, debuted in 2022 and was based on his 2020 Audible play.
Now comes Eisenberg’s second movie, A Real Pain, set for release on Nov. 1, which he directed and costars in with Kieran Culkin. The two play estranged cousins on a Holocaust tour in Poland. Eisenberg is aware of the cinematic-literary tradition that comes before him, yet he never set out to be an auteur. “Even five years ago I would have said I don’t want to direct a movie,” he says. “That just seems ridiculous and aspirational and impossible.”
In both his writing and in conversation, Eisenberg pays close attention to language. He will often begin to answer a question, then pause—editing in real time—and start over with a more precise explanation. It’s not that he’s being evasive. Rather, it’s because he doesn’t want to sound pretentious or incompetent, or both.
For decades, he’s paid careful attention on movie sets, too. Eisenberg studied the productions of everything from technically demanding big-budget franchises to improvisational shoestring indies, “figuring out the way I like to work and figuring out what doesn’t work.” He counts directors Richard Ayoade (The Double) and Greg Mottola (Adventureland) as directorial inspirations. “They’re in my head all the time,” he says.
Eisenberg also learned a lot from the experience of making his first film, When You Finish Saving the World. “I knew and loved my characters so much,” he says, “I assumed that an audience would find them just as endearing. Then I realized that the audience did not have that same feeling.” For A Real Pain, says Eisenberg, “I knew I had to write characters that were more explicitly understandable.”
Another big lesson Eisenberg learned while directing his latest movie was the need to stay flexible. For example, he wanted to shoot A Real Pain in winter—“I prefer a winter movie,” he says—but Culkin’s schedule only allotted four weeks, which happened to be in summer.
But what really changed on the set, says Eisenberg, was that “Kieran won’t stand on a mark. Once I realized how amazing he is at being a spontaneous actor and how much life he’ll bring to the movie if he’s not on a mark, that’s so much more important than the shot we had planned. So we scrapped a lot and followed Kieran. It’s the nature of making a thing with a hundred different people and personalities. You have to change course.”
That course changing extended to dialogue, too. “I really don’t like improv, but Kieran is such an unusual performer. He would say things that deviated from the script, and a lot of times they were just better. When I first heard something that was a deviation, it rang a false note for me because I had to look at the script for so long. But in the editing room we ended up going with some of Keiran’s improvs because they just felt natural to him.”
The dramatic structure of the movie provides a steady, disquieting tension—the tour eventually winds up at a concentration camp—and Eisenberg works off it in an understated yet powerful way. “Our best jokes are not in the movie, because they stand out—which is not the thing you want,” says Eisenberg. “I remember the director of Zombieland, Ruben Fleischer, said, ‘The six best jokes I’ve seen in a movie in ten years were cut out of our movie.’ Those jokes, when kept in, usually ruin a movie.”
This sense of restraint is what makes A Real Pain so well realized, a lean 90 minutes, more of an immaculate short story than a sprawling novel. Eisenberg is at home in a world of discomfort, but in this case the catastrophes you might anticipate never arrive. “I’ve been shocked, genuinely shocked to read people accusing me of writing cringe comedy,” says Eisenberg. “To me, this is exactly the way the world works and, usually, the nicer version of it. Maybe I live in a cringey world. But to me, this is the way I view the world.”
After all, his parents “tend to like my work,” he says, “with the exception of a ten-page scene in my play The Spoils, where I beg a woman to defecate on my face.” You know how parents are.
When pressed on the topic of cringe, Eisenberg does admit a high tolerance for staged awkwardness: “I’m so in love with the British Office by Ricky Gervais. To me, it was like the greatest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. To me he’s representing the world I think I live in.”
Eisenberg is well aware of the vagaries of his unforgiving business, and he professes to be equally enthused playing a small part in a big production as he is writing and directing movies. But surely he has to love the groove he’s in now writing and directing his own projects—calling the shots and living with his choices. “My only goal in the arts is to stay busy,” he says.
That doesn’t appear to be a problem—at least not this year. Eisenberg is acting in Now You See Me 3 this summer and fall. And when he’s done with that, he is scheduled to begin production on another movie he’s written and will direct. Casting isn’t complete, but he could possibly play a small role in the film, too.
Yes, it’s a musical. Why do you ask?
Photographed by Mark Seliger
Styled by Chloe Hartstein
Hair by Kevin Ryan using GO247 & UNITE
Grooming by Jessica Ortiz for La Mer
Makeup by Rebecca Restrepo using Lisa Eldridge Beauty
Production by Madi Overstreet and Ruth Levy
Set Design by Michael Sturgeon
Nails by Eri Handa using Dior
Tailoring by Yana Galbshtein
Design Director Rockwell Harwood
Contributing Visual Director James Morris
Executive Producer, Video Dorenna Newton
Executive Director, Entertainment Randi Peck
You Might Also Like
