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Jesse Eisenberg didn’t take home the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for A Real Pain on Sunday, but the filmmaker and actor still won big. Not only did Kieran Culkin win Best Supporting Actor for his role in the film, but the application for Polish citizenship Eisenberg applied for after filming in Poland has been granted.
“I’m so unbelievably honored. This is an honor of a lifetime and something I have been very interested in for two decades,” Eisenberg said at the citizenship ceremony, per Variety.
In 2008, the writer-director traveled to Poland with his wife and promised his late Aunt Doris that he would take a picture of the Krasnystaw home she lived in before having to flee the Nazis. During the visit, he previously told Rolling Stone, he didn’t feel “something profound,” noting: “I was just kind of mystified that I had no connection to this place whatsoever. How is it possible that my family lived here longer than they lived in Queens, and I have no connection to it?”
Filming A Real Pain in Poland allowed Eisenberg to connect more with his roots both through the film itself and the ways in which it inspired him to understand the rich history there more deeply.
“While we were filming this movie in Poland, and I was walking the streets and starting to get a little more comfortable in the country, something so obvious occurred to me, which is that my family had lived in this place for far longer than we lived in New York,” he said. “And of course, the history ended so tragically. In addition to that tragedy of history is also the tragedy that my family didn’t feel any connection any more to Poland, and that saddened me and confirmed for me that I really wanted to try to reconnect as much as possible.”
Polish citizenship is available to direct descendants of ancestors who were born in the country or lived there after 1920. Eisenberg’s Aunt Doris lived in the country until 1938, when she fled to the U.S. and put roots down in New York. She died in 2019 at the age of 106. “I really hope that tonight in this ceremony and this amazing honour is the first step of me, and on behalf of my family, reconnecting to this beautiful country,” Eisenberg said.
Culkin and Eisenberg play cousins Benji and David in A Real Pain, two polar opposite characters bound by their familial history and the traits they see in one another that spark a complicated mix of awe and envy. “It just seemedsoright,” Eisenberg told Rolling Stone about casting Culkin. “I mean, when we got together finally on set, after he, like, literally, tried to drop out of the movie multiple times, it was just, Oh, my God! It felt like this is my long-lost acting partner!”
