All posts tagged: Jennifer Grey

Jennifer Grey discusses working with Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin

Jennifer Grey discusses working with Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin

When Jennifer Grey received the script for A Real Pain, she was — like most of the country — deeply entrenched in the final episodes of Succession. The actress, who is best known for her work in movies like Dirty Dancing and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, was considering a role in the story (written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg) about two cousins who join a Jewish heritage tour in Poland to reconnect with their late grandmother and visit the town that she fled before the war. Kieran Culkin was already attached to star as the lead opposite Eisenberg, and Grey says she was excited about the possibility of working with the actor responsible for some of the show’s finest work. “And then I read the script, and I went from excited to elated,” she told THR during a panel at the St. Regis Deer Valley, sponsored by Screenvision. “It’s a very deep movie, about relationships and grief and loss and identity and resilience. Jesse’s tone is so human and accessible and vulnerable and funny. Immediately, …

Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin Explore Loss

Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin Explore Loss

If you stick around for even part of some post-screening festival Q&As with directors, at times you can get the feeling they’re expounding on the film they intended to make rather than the one you’ve just seen. But Jesse Eisenberg is nothing if not hyper-articulate. He describes the essence of his delicate second feature, A Real Pain, as a consideration of “epic pain vs. more modern pain,” and how to reconcile the latter against something as monumental as genocide or historical trauma. What’s surprising is that he achieves this with a deft lightness of touch in a frequently laugh-out-loud funny odd couple road trip movie whose emotional wallop sneaks up and floors you. Eisenberg’s perceptive script — rooted in his family’s history — shares some thematic territory with the multihyphenate’s second play, The Revisionist, in which he starred off-Broadway with Vanessa Redgrave in 2013. It’s about the conflict of Americans grappling with their own troubles, however minor, while attempting to be mindful of the punishing experience endured by ancestors from traumatized cultures — a Holocaust …