We'll tell you up front: Actor-director Jesse Eisenberg, who says he can appreciate a good Jewish deli, is a different kind of movie star.We joined him last week at the legendary Canter's Deli in Los Angeles, and shared some chocolate babka, with a dill pickle chaser.
"This is the real test," Eisenberg said.It was a little unusual, but for Eisenberg, it'd already been a pretty unusual day.Just a few hours earlier, he received his second Oscar nomination, this time for best original screenplay.And he was mortified.I asked, "Are you able to enjoy moments like this?""No, I'm not really wired to enjoy praise," he replied.
"I don't know why.I think it just, like, I don't know, triggers some guilt response in my brain and I try to find something to be miserable about.
But I'll tell you what I do love: I love actually doing my job.Like, I feel so lucky that I found something I like to do." At the moment, his job is to promote the film he wrote, directed and starred in, "A Real Pain," co-starring Kieran Culkin.
The film is about two cousins who travel to Poland to see their ancestral home, and visit the actual home of their late grandmother, who barely survived the Holocaust.The film started out as a buddy movie about a trip to Mongolia.
As he was writing the script, Eisenberg got stuck, until inspiration literally popped up on his computer."I was, like, 30 pages into the script and something was missing," he said.
"I knew the script was not going well.And so, I'm, like, kind of, like, banging my head against the keyboard.
And an ad pops up online for 'Auschwitz tours.' And then in parentheses, 'with lunch.' And I was like, 'Auschwitz tours (with lunch)?' That's, like, the strangest pairing of four words I've ever seen.And once I saw that, and once I read that brochure, I was like, 'Oh, that's the movie.
That is so interesting,' because I was trying to deal with these two characters who are both kind of, like, in pain in their own ways.""Dude, we are Jew...