‘A Real Pain’: Read The Screenplay That Makes Kieran Culkin & Jesse Eisenberg Traveling Cousins Wanting To Honor Grandma

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Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg in "A Real Pain" Searchlight Pictures

Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series highlighting the scripts behind this year’s awards-season movies continues with A Real Pain, Searchlight‘s buzzy Sundance dramedy marking the sophomore feature directing effort of actor-filmmaker Jesse Eisenberg.

The The Social Network star also penned the script about a pair of cousins who reunite for a tour of Poland to honor their grandmother, but see older tensions resurface against the backdrop of their family’s history.

The movie also stars Kieran Culkin in his first post-Succession film role. He plays Benji opposite Eisenberg’s David (Eisenberg); together their goal is to end up at the house their grandmother left behind after the Nazis swept through and rounded up the Jews. Fun fact: the house they discover was one that was already in Eisenberg’s family. It belonged to his great aunt.

Searchlight snapped up the pic up for $10 million in the first major deal out of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Hailing from Topic and Fruit Tree, A Real Pain also stars Jennifer Grey (Dirty Dancing), Will Sharpe (The White Lotus), Kurt Egyiawan (Beasts of No Nation), Liza Sadovy (A Small Light) and Daniel Oreskes (Only Murders in the Building). Producers include Ali Herting, Dave McCary, Ewa Puszczynska, Jennifer Semler, Eisenberg and Emma Stone. It hit theaters November 1.

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When setting out to write and ultimately direct A Real Pain, Eisenberg’s intention wasn’t to also star in the flick. But as he told Pete Hammond on Deadline’s Behind the Lens video series, “People are most likely to produce something if there’s an actor attached to it. So I have been signing on to do my own [works], almost reluctantly, just so I can get the momentum going.”

For Eisenberg, the film came on the heels of When You Finish Saving the World, his dramedy starring Julianne Moore and Finn Wolfhard, which was released by A24 in January 2023 after premiering at Sundance.

Read his A Real Pain script below.