Kieran Culkin’s untraditional way of preparing for dialogue in his roles managed to blow away his A Real Pain costar Jesse Eisenberg.
“Kieran wouldn’t learn the lines until the morning we were shooting — and you saw the movie — you saw he has, like, monologue after monologue,” Eisenberg, 41, said during a Thursday, December 12, appearance on Virgin Radio UK.
“He was just so unpretentious, he would say, ‘What scene are we filming today?’ And I’d say, ‘It’s the scene [where] you have five pages of dialogue,’” Eisenberg recalled. “And he’d say, ‘Let me take a look at it,’ as I give him my script, and he learns it in 30 seconds and he’s like, word perfect.”
Eisenberg noted that he had heard from the directors of Succession — in which Culkin, 42, starred as Roman Roy from 2018 to 2023 — that “he has some crazed ability.”
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While reflecting on Culkin’s acting career, Eisenberg added, “Maybe because he was acting since he was so young.” (Culkin made his acting debut at age 7, playing Fuller McAllister in 1990’s Home Alone, in which his older brother Macaulay starred as the lead, Kevin McAllister.)
While Eisenberg claimed that his costar could memorize anything in 30 seconds, he alleged that Culkin wouldn’t be able to recall the lines later on.
“He tells me, ‘I could memorize anything in 30 seconds, but I can’t tell you the next day. I can’t tell you one word from it,’” Eisenberg recalled. “So he has some, temporary — you know, it’s muscle memory — some temporary bank.”
Eisenberg noted that Culkin is “on some other plane of existence,” before revealing another unusual habit that his costar did.
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“He was sleeping two hours a night every night,” Eisenberg claimed. “The hotel called us one day and they were like, ‘Is he OK?’ We said, ‘What’s wrong?’ They’re like, ‘We found his mattress on the floor.’ I guess he was sleeping on the floor of his hotel room.”
While Eisenberg said that his costar “didn’t prepare for the part,” he explained that he couldn’t figure out how Culkin was managing to nail his lines.
“I couldn’t figure out, a guy coming to set not knowing his lines at all and then being perfect during filming,” Eisenberg said. “I think he was just like living in the spirit of the character.”
A Real Pain centers around cousins David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Culkin) who travel to Poland to pay tribute to the homeland of their recently passed grandmother, who had survived the Holocaust. Eisenberg wrote and directed the comedy drama, which received a standing ovation at the Sundance Film Festival in January.
