Adopting Another Place: A Conversation with Jesse Eisenberg

Jesse_Eisenberg_fot_ED_JL_AMPAS_forum-0972835862.jpg, default, Jesse Eisenberg arrives on the red carpet of the 97th Oscars® at the Dolby® Theatre at Ovation Hollywood on Sunday, March 2, 2025, photo: ED/JL/A.M.P.

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For Jesse Eisenberg, Poland is more than a place of ancestral memory: it is a country he has chosen to explore, embrace and call home. In a conversation about Polish-Jewish roots, family stories and ‘A Real Pain’, the Hollywood star reflects on the complicated histories that connect generations, and on how cinema can help us see Poland in all its colour, vitality and complexity.

I had been planning for us to just grab a coffee at a Warsaw café. Jesse Eisenberg had been on a long stay in Poland and I wanted to hear all about it. But it turned out that the Hollywood actor, writer, director and producer had just hopped on a plane back to the States. Nonetheless, we ended up having a fascinating conversation online. We talked about finding roots and connections, about history and how it informs the present and, of course, about his iconic film A Real Pain. But would I find out what he was really doing here?

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Photo from the 'Poland: More than you expected' campaign shoot, photo: Dominik Śmiałowski / POT

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Nitzan Reisner: What have you been up to lately? You seemed to be popping up on Polish socials everywhere. Can you tell us a little about your latest trip?

Jesse Eisenberg: So I was in Poland for about a month, because we came in initially for the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, which is a film festival in the Czech Republic, and then we had a plan several weeks later to go work in Ukraine, and so it allowed for this amazing, long period in Poland. My wife's family comes from Łódź, her father's birth certificate says Łódź. My wife's father's family escaped Poland before the war, and he was actually born in the Ural Mountains, but for whatever reason his birth certificate says Łódź.

NR: I believe many birth certificates of people in motion were based only on what people told the registrar.

JE: We don't even know when he was born, really, because they put December, and we heard that it wasn’t actually December. Nonetheless, my wife's father comes from Łódź, my father's family comes from the Lublin area, but moved to Szczecin, or were moved to Szczecin after the war, like so many other Poles.

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Motława River Embankment, Gdańsk, photo: Dariusz Zarod / East News

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NR: So you’ve visited Lublin and Łódź. Where else have you been?

JE: Honestly, I just wanted to visit every city in Poland, for so many different reasons. For instance, I wanted to go to Białystok, because I'm so interested in Esperanto. Esperanto is incredible to me.

But there are so many wonderful things all around Poland, like Wrocław has this amazing American film festival. We obviously wanted to visit the beautiful Baltic cities of Sopot, Gdańsk, and Gdynia. My family also lived in the northwest, in Szczecin. So, you know, I got to know the country.

NR: I think you know Poland much better than I do at this point!

JE: Well, you know, it's very typical for somebody who's a foreigner like me to kind of overindulge in a new place. Whereas in New York City, I've never been to the Statue of Liberty. And yet I've probably been to every Polish monument, because that's what happens when you adopt another place. I feel really comfortable and at home in Poland.

Yeah, so that was our trip. It was punctuated by a few different things, though. One is that we had several meetings about getting citizenship, which we're all very thrilled about. It was a complicated process.

I understand that some people feel I've kind of lucked into it, because of being famous or something. And I understand that might be part of it. But the other part really is that both our families come from Poland – from Łódź, from Lublin. We actually have that connection.

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Polish President Andrzej Duda grants actor and filmmaker Jesse Eisenberg with Polish citizenship at an event held at the Polish Mission to the United Nations in New York City, U.S., March 4, 2025, photo: Adam Gray / Reuters / Forum

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NR: Citizenship really mattered to you and your family.

JE: I have a great affection for Poland. And I’m somebody who’s in the public eye. One of the things that I wanted to do with Polish citizenship is to just be a kind of unofficial ambassador for Poland around the world.

I found myself in the last two years talking to hundreds of people about how much I love Poland. And a lot of these people are kind of sceptical of the country based on its tragic history. So, it felt to me as if, because of my movie and my history, I became a kind of unofficial ambassador promoting the country.

NR: I think you may be official now that you've met Prime Minister Donald Tusk – and he gave you a shirt and everything.

JE: [laughs] But I guess I just mean my intent, for those who are sceptical of me getting Polish citizenship when I understand it takes other people decades, I just want to express that I plan on being a good ambassador.

NR: I think you've already proved that. And I think that you definitely deserve it. And you have all of the papers to prove it. So don't worry. How did it feel to actually become a Polish citizen?

JE: What’s the best way to put it? On the one hand, it's like this kind of very formal bureaucratic thing – you get fingerprinted and have to present a thousand documents and lawyers have to translate a million documents with personal information. So there's a real kind of practical bureaucratic side to the whole thing.

But then the other thing is the symbolism of it – thinking about my family's history, not just the bad parts of history in Poland, but the good parts of history in Poland. They lived in Poland for hundreds of years before World War II. They lived in Poland when it was not Poland. They lived in Poland before it became ‘not Poland’. So when I think about what this means, it just fills me with a sense of awe and humility – of being part of something bigger.

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Meat store, Warsaw 1982, photo: Chris Niedenthal / promotional materials

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Chris Niedenthal, Warszawa 1982. Sklep mięsny, fot. materiały promocyjne

NR: The Eisenbergs return to their homeland. Had you heard about Poland as a kid?

JE: I did not grow up hearing the best things about Poland. My cousins lived in Szczecin and we heard about bread lines [during communism] and we heard about the Holocaust history. Whereas my experience going to Poland for the first time in 2006 was that it couldn't have been more different than what I'd heard growing up.

I saw this beautiful, colourful, magnetic, thriving place. And so I feel like maybe people in our generation may have an opportunity to change perceptions and change how we perceive the long history of Jews in Poland.

NR: That is very poignant. I think a lot of people outside of Poland have a very dreary, grey vision of the country. They see photos from World War II or communism in black-and-white and think that Poland doesn’t actually exist in colour. All you have to do is add a splash colour and all of a sudden it's this different place.

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Still from the film 'A Real Pain' directed by Jesse Eisenberg, pictured: Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg in front of the POLIN Museum, 2024, photo: Agata Grzybowska, courtesy of Searchlight Pictures, © 2024 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved

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NR: This is a good place to bring up your movie ‘A Real Pain’. I think for a lot of people, like myself, the fact that you showed Poland as bright, colourful and beautiful was astonishing. It looked like an actual love letter.

JE: That was all very, very intentional. I knew from the outset that so many American movies that take place in Poland are either in a kind of bleak colour palette, black and white for the historical movies, and are filmed to just evoke a kind of dreariness. During my first conversations with the cinematographer, this wonderful genius Michał Dymek, I told him I wanted to make this look as beautiful as possible – in part because that's the Poland I saw, and in part because I didn’t want to make a depressing Holocaust movie.

I think history is more complicated for people in my generation. I think people in my generation see things with enough distance to be able to not only see one thing, to not see just one version of Poland.

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The old town of Lublin, photo: Jacek Szydłowski / Forum

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NR: After all of this travelling, do you have a special place, a favourite place in Poland, a place that you really feel connected to?

JE: Yeah. I mean, I just, I love Lublin. I think it's such an amazing city. This may sound ignorant, but it feels to me like a university town. It just feels like a bustling university town, and then, you can't beat that old town in Lublin. It feels like you're entering a different time, it feels like you're time travelling. It's just incredible.

The fact that my family comes from that area makes me a little biased [laughs].

NR: Maybe that’s exactly why you feel a connection to it.

JE: Yeah. I mean, my family is really from Krasnystaw, which is in the Lublin area. But Lublin is just incredible, it’s like a time capsule.

NR: There's a part in ‘A Real Pain’ where you talk about imagining if the war never happened and you were still living in Poland. You probably wouldn't be in Krasnystaw anymore – you would’ve moved to the big city. You'd be in Lublin.

JE: [laughs] Yeah, exactly!

NR: I wanted to ask about that Polish connection. When did you find out about your Polish Jewish roots?

JE: When I was growing up, occasionally this woman would come to America named Maria. She spoke English, with an accent. There was always a kind of a kind of mystery around this person. I remember hearing my dad talking about her with a kind of awe and sympathy. I eventually understood that she was from Poland. But she was just a complete mystery to me.

That's where my initial contact with Poland happened, that was the first time I heard about Poland. But what really shifted for me was when I started seeing my aunt Doris every week. She was born in 1912 in Poland and lived there for the first eight years of her life. I started visiting her regularly when I was 18, every week until she died at 106. I was living with her for a period of time in my early thirties.

I lived with her in a tiny apartment in New York. She was like my mentor in my life. And I became really interested in her history because I was studying anthropology in college and here it was, this real person with a real connection to history.

I told her if I ever got a job in Europe, I’d drive to the little house she grew up in Krasnystaw and take a picture for her. When I got a job working in Bosnia, I rented a car and my wife and I drove to this little town and I took a picture for her and I printed it out at Kinko's and I came back to her apartment.

She could not care less [laughs]. She said, ‘Oh yeah, that was it.’ And that was it. She was not easily impressed.

It was on this trip that I also had the opportunity to meet Maria, this woman, my cousin who survived the war. And I stayed with Maria for two weeks.

After that, I wrote my first play The Revisionist about my relationship with her. I just became increasingly interested in my history there. The play got a lot of attention in New York and I got to meet other people who are Polish and just became ever more interested in this country.

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NR: When did ‘A Real Pain’ come into play?

JE: Well, I was trying to write a movie about these two guys who go on a trip and the script was not going well. It was about these two guys, Benji and David, who are friends from high school going to Mongolia.

The script was not going well and one day I saw an ad online for ‘Auschwitz tours with lunch’. And that inspired me. I switched the movie to be about a Holocaust tour, or a heritage tour, switched the characters to be cousins. And so that has obviously increased my relationship to Poland that much more.

NR: So it was only after adding all these personal pieces to the story that it made sense? Wow, a completely different story. Did you start researching your family history?

JE: Yeah. My dad has a cousin, Lauren, who went through all of the family history, and there's another cousin who visited Maria and wrote a lot about her story.

Oh, and when shooting in Krasnystaw, everybody told me I should go talk to this great guy, the town’s gynaecologist. Who also happens to be the town genealogist and he had a lot of my family's history. Really funny story.

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Main Square in Krasnystaw, photo: Jakub Orzechowski / Agencja Wyborcza

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NR: [laughs] A gynaecologist-geneaologist – only in Krasnystaw. Speaking of which… Your actual family town is the town you used in the movie?

JE: We filmed at the house that my family lived in.

[This is where our respective children barged in, demanding attention, and rightly so]

NR: That's amazing. I have to say that that scene is one of my favourites in the whole movie. And now it’s taken on a whole new dimension. I take it we’ll be seeing more of you in Poland?

JE: Definitely. We’ll definitely be coming back.

NR: Lublin will actually be the European Capital of Culture in 2029, so…

JE: Really? Oh, that’s fantastic. Yes, I will be there.

*During our conversation on a Tuesday afternoon (CET), Eisenberg did not divulge a thing about what he had been doing in Poland. Later that evening, this popped up on my Instagram. Nice one, Jesse!

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POLAND. More than you expected | Episode 1: Warsaw

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