Jesse Eisenberg continues to tread the festival circuit with his musical comedy The Debut, and on Sunday afternoon was wildly entertaining at a high-energy Screen Talk event ahead of his film’s closing the BFI London Film Festival.
Eisenberg, star of Zombieland, Now You See Me and The Social Network, had the crowd in stitches as he spoke about growing up in community theater, refusing to watch himself on screen — ”I don’t like the way I look” — and why he believes musical theater performers are closer to NBA athletes than they are to regular movie and TV actors.
But there was one story in particular that had the room hanging onto Eisenberg’s every word, as he relived the chaotic process of working with Kieran Culkin on Eisenberg’s last film, A Real Pain — the same movie that would earn Culkin his first Oscar for best supporting actor last year.
“We didn’t know if Kieran was ever gonna show up to Poland,” began Eisenberg about the process (A Real Pain stars him and Culkin as two Jewish-American cousins who reunite for a Holocaust heritage tour through Poland). “Kieran doesn’t call on anybody back — he’s one of those people that you hear about occasionally. They’re brilliant, but you don’t know if they’re gonna be there.”
Eisenberg said Culkin, best known for his role as Roman Roy in HBO’s Succession, will “sign on to your thing, but then he decides he likes potatoes instead,” prompting laughter. Culkin is “worth the risk because he’s so great,” but Eisenberg’s Zombieland co-star Emma Stone — who has produced all three of the actor-director’s movies — had to chaperone Culkin on the plane to Poland. “She sent me a video of him going through customs saying, ‘We are here.’ And then he was still late,” continued Eisenberg.
Eisenberg went on to explain that because Culkin had come off the free-wheeling set of Succession, he was initially “angry” at Eisenberg’s rigidity and for telling him to stand on certain marks. Eisenberg soon realized he had to reimagine the whole film around Culkin’s live-wire act. “He’s not great in the first half of the scene because I made him [stand] at the mark,” said Eisenberg after the audience was shown a clip from A Real Pain. “He was frustrated that he had to stand there… Once [we began] following him around — because that’s the only way he’s gonna be loose — holy shit, he was so brilliant.”
It worked out well for Culkin’s performance and Eisenberg’s film — after all, he said, Culkin’s manic-depressive character is the driving force of the story. But the problem was Culkin “never wanted to rehearse it.” Eisenberg continued: “He wouldn’t do a phone call with me. He asked me to meet him once before we filmed the movie and I met him and his kids at a diner. I couldn’t get a word in and I wanted to talk about the Holocaust, and he’s sitting there feeding his kids French toast.”
On that note, Eisenberg was asked about being championed by the two-time Oscar-winning actress Stone, whose Fruit Tree production company has financed When You Finish Saving the World (2022), A Real Pain (2024) and The Debut (2026). “I met Emma when she was 20 and I was 25, we were doing Zombieland together,” he said. “And we had really similar taste. She’s a very glamorous Hollywood actress, but at heart she’s a comedy nerd.”
“I couldn’t have foreseen that 15 years later, we’d be making movies together, except for the fact that it seems so obvious now. You meet people when you’re young […] and when you both get enough experience or in her case, much more power in the industry, she can help shepherd my stuff along. And I feel really lucky.” He added: “We’re contemporaries, but she got really, really powerful. Now she can do this kind of stuff and I’m the beneficiary.” Though as a footnote, when it was suggested that Stone is using her platform “for good,” Eisenberg quipped: “Well, she’s not, like, planting trees.”
Eisenberg touched on working with David Fincher on The Social Network and even said the set was so “moody” and “intense” that he developed insomnia while playing a young Mark Zuckerberg. “I wouldn’t be able to sleep so I’d watch Seinfeld all night,” he revealed. “We had these doctors come to set and the doctors were giving samples of sleeping pills, but they wouldn’t give you more than four. So I would have to call another doctor who didn’t know that because I needed a new sample.”
Later in the session, after Eisenberg had talked about his close friendship with British comedian Richard Ayoade and why the entirety of The Debut depended on Julianne Moore, he was asked what’s next and revealed that he’d written six episodes of a TV show a few years ago, though he didn’t seem particularly excited about the project. “It’ll be a series,” he said. “I know that’s boring. You just have to sit there.”
Eisenberg was amusingly nervous about getting himself into hot water during the session. He told the crowd, “Forgive me for bringing up someone who was triggering; I’m so sorry about that,” when discussing Woody Allen’s influence on his early career ambitions. He also jokingly said, “I’d love to bring up the current war…” when an attendee asked whether Eisenberg plans to tell more Jewish stories. He answered that he enjoys the overlapping of feeling like both an insider and an outsider as an Ashkenazi Jew. “We are in circles that have been more homogeneous throughout history, but we also have an outsider perspective on it. […] Forgive me if whatever I just said was offensive to anybody in any way,” he added. “This is how I think of myself and how I think of my relationship to my culture. I’m not speaking for Jews or any other culture.”
“If I’m not cancelled,” Eisenberg’s The Debut will be closing the 70th BFI London Film Festival on Sunday night.