The 2025 Oscars caused Eric André some real pain.
The comedian has revealed that Jesse Eisenberg asked him to join A Real Pain to play Benji, the role that ultimately won Kieran Culkin an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
“Two years ago, Jesse Eisenberg calls me and offered me the role that Kieran Culkin got the Oscar for,” André said on the new episode of Andrew Santino’s Whiskey Ginger podcast. “I read the script. I was like, ‘I dunno if I wanna go to Poland.'”
André explained that his hesitation to be in the film, about two cousins who travel to Poland to honor their grandmother, stemmed from his own dark family history. “All my Jewish side is Polish Jews that got cooked in the concentration camps,” he said. “So I was like, ‘That seems really miserable, and not in my lane.’ I read the script, and I was like, ‘To go to Poland for six weeks and shoot a movie where we’re just babbling about the Holocaust seems like a bummer.'”
He added that he declined Eisenberg’s offer because he didn’t think he could match the project’s wavelength. “I was like, ‘I appreciate the offer, sure it’s gonna be great. I don’t think that’s what I’m looking for right now,'” he recalled. “I was just like, ‘This is a lot of work.’ It was a tremendous amount of dialogue. It’s a lot of work for something I’m not totally sure I’m right for, and I want to focus on a movie that got pushed 50 times because of all the strikes that I couldn’t have predicted.”
André wasn’t particularly thrilled when he saw the outcome of the Oscars’ Best Supporting Actor race. “The motherf—er won an Oscar for the role I passed on,” he said. “And it’s not like I get offered roles constantly. I’m not f—in’ Leonardo DiCapricock. It’s once in a while I get offered a role, and I said ‘no’ to one of the only times I’ve been offered a role, and it turned into an Academy Award.”
He continued, “It still stings when you’re watching Hollywood burn, you’re watching America burn, and you’re watching the Oscars, and you’re like, ‘Oh, maybe I should’ve taken that.'”
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Santino also noted that Culkin’s heritage doesn’t match Benji’s background as accurately as André’s does. “That kid’s not even Jewish, Culkin. They’re not Jewish, are they?” he asked.
André responded, “I don’t think so. They’re Catholic.”
Later, when André suggested that Santino could have played Culkin’s role in the movie, the host replied, “I’m not Jewish!”
André shot back, “Neither is Kieran Culkin.”
But Santino suggested that Culkin’s talent transcended ethnic identity. “Yeah, but he’s Kieran Culkin, my guy. Succesh?”
“Never seen it,” André said. “I’m on the first season of Lost. And that’s not a joke.”
Watch the full conversation between André and Santino above.