Jesse Eisenberg is hunched forward in his seat in a Soho hotel room, speaking rapidly, digressively, about the film he has just written and directed. In A Real Pain, the star of The Social Network plays what can only be described as an Eisenbergian character – clever, introverted, socially awkward – on a pilgrimage to Poland with his cousin (Kieran Culkin) to revisit a painful part of his family history. Eisenberg made that same trip in real life. In the film, he repeatedly watches videos of his son being cute, marvelling at his curiosity. Here and now, Eisenberg pauses our interview to take a video call in the hotel room. It’s his seven-year-old son, Banner, who wants to show him how he pronounces his Rs. Eisenberg marvels. “Oh honey, you’re such a good student,” he tells him. “You sound perfect.” Father and son in both scenarios, it turns out, are the same people. “Were you starstruck?” Eisenberg asks me of his boy’s budding celebrity.
There was a time when Eisenberg was known for being a tricky interviewee – not in the expect-a-call-from-his-publicist-later kind of way, but rather in the sense that he might destroy you with a withering putdown should you fail to measure up intellectually. Today, the 41-year-old is a tough interview for altogether different reasons. He is genial and unfailingly polite, but – amid the fusillades of observation, introspection and droll self-doubt – he lives up to his reputation of asking questions as much as answering them (which may be why I find myself off on a tangent explaining that the London borough of Walthamstow is associated with the boyband East 17).
