For most of his twenties, James Franco gave acting his all. It didn't work out quite as he'd wished. He can be funny about this—drily demeaning himself the first time we meet as "a youngleadingmaninbadmovies actor"—but, in truth, it left him depressed and frustrated, and for the most part deeply dissatisfied with the result of his efforts. "I put a lot of time into it," he says. "I wanted to be the best actor that I could be. It's just sad for me, because I know I worked so hard, and I just feel like in some ways I kind of blew it. It's just hard to get away from what I see as the stain of these bad movies."
He has been trying. Franco first attended UCLA in 1996 but dropped out after a year to pursue acting. A while back, he decided to more or less drop out of acting and return to UCLA as a fulltime student. He arrives on this Monday evening in May at a café in Westwood near the UCLA campus, fresh from two midterms—one on the philosophy of science, the other on earlytwentiethcentury American literature. Tomorrow's midterms will be for American Holocaust literature and French. As an actor, Franco established a reputation as someone who would leap into his roles with obsessive gusto, focus, and determination, even when the roles didn't deserve it. He seems to be embracing his studies in a similar spirit. "I think I broke the record for the number of units I'm taking this quarter," he says. The standard limit is nineteen, though students sometimes manage to take a few more. Twentythree, say, or twentyfour. Franco is taking sixtytwo.
**Ironically, as James Franco moves away from acting—**this autumn he plans to continue his education at graduate school in New York and will be available for filming only during the summers—he finds himself with two movies that he considers he can be "proud of having done." The first is _Pineapple Express; _having worked so hard for so long to inhabit roles of obvious weight and intensity, Franco gives one of his richest and most impressive performances as a drug dealer in a Judd Apatow–produced stoner/buddy comedy opposite Seth Rogen.
In some ways, Pineapple Express could be seen as Franco's past rising up to save him. He had appeared in little more than a Pizza Hut commercial and as one of the background high school delinquents in the Drew Barrymore comedy Never Been Kissed when he was cast in Apatow's TV series Freaks and Geeks. "What I remember about meeting James," says Apatow, "was that he had this really big mouth, and he was very skinny, and very greasy. And he really made me laugh. I thought he was funny and strange. We had no sense that he was attractive—we just thought he was this, you know, wannabe cool guy, but it wasn't quite working, a funny mess of a guy, the way he performed the scenes. After we hired him, we kept hearing from women in the office that he was so dreamy. We didn't know what the hell they were talking about."
Even then, an unusual fervor and obsession with detail was apparent in Franco. It was cowriter Paul Feig's school days that provided the Freaks and Geeks template, so not long after shooting the pilot, Franco, who played the offkilter but charming Daniel Desario, flew to Michigan without telling anyone, to do research at Feig's old high school. "I don't know how I got it into my head to do things this way," Franco says. "Was it necessary Probably not." He called Feig while he was there. "He thought I was crazy."
During the show's run, three of the freaks—Franco, Seth Rogen, and Jason Segel—would meet at Segel's house on Saturday mornings for extra, unofficial rehearsals. "I mean, they weren't the most rigorous rehearsals," says Franco. "For the most part we just liked hanging out." In the end, he says, it was Rogen and Segel who became really good friends. At the time, Segel was dating Linda Cardellini, who was friends with Franco's onscreen girlfriend, Busy Philipps, who had a problem with Franco. "And so I think Jason took her side and thought I was a jerk," he says. "I'll admit I was not a team player. A lot of it, I think, just had to do with being obnoxious when the camera was on someone else. Maybe I'd eat a banana in the background that would take focus away from other actors. I didn't think about it that way, but now I could say, 'Look, the scene's not about me, it's about them, just chill out, James. Don't eat a fucking banana.' "
"James just had so much energy," says Apatow, "he was like a wild cougar on the set." But Apatow also notes that he has photographs of Franco on the set "lying on a car in between takes reading Dostoevsky—you would walk by him and he is reading James Joyce, and you would literally take the book from him and try to ascertain if he really was reading it. Are the pages really turned enough Is this just an act Is he really reading James Joyce in the eight minutes between lighting setups And he was."
_Freaks and Geeks _was canceled after one season; Franco only met Apatow again when he agreed to record some commentary for the show's belated DVD release. (On these DVDs, Apatow describes the young Franco's method "I always say you don't know what Franco's going to do, but two out of ten it's the greatest thing you've ever seen. And the other eight you've got to sit through. You don't know what's going to come out. He might lick your face eight times.") When they saw each other, Franco remembers Apatow saying, "I miss the funny Franco"; Apatow remembers Franco saying, "We should try and do something funny together." Apatow immediately thought of Pineapple Express. "I didn't understand why he was neglecting this side of himself," says Apatow, who concedes that nonetheless he didn't anticipate how naturally and wholeheartedly Franco would embrace the experience. "After seeing everything that James has done over the years, you don't instantly think, 'Well, James is going to be a riot on the set.' Are we going to have to explain what we're going for to him But, no, we were all trying to keep up with him. On the first table read, he crushed every joke in the entire movie." For his part, Franco suggests that what was sometimes deemed disruptive on a TV set a decade earlier now fit in far better "Some of the spirit of what I was doing is how he makes his movies now. All this improvisation. And doing the television show, they weren't open to improvisation like he is now. Either I got funnier or they started encouraging that stupid, horrible stuff that they had to sit through."
There are always new ways to be misunderstood. In the weeks leading up to _Pineapple Express'_s release, Franco has begun to discover the mid blessings that may be bestowed upon a modernday stoner hero. "Already," he relates, "I have had people come up to me in cafés and say, 'Hey, you're James Franco, right Hey, I can't get hold of my guy—do you know where I can buy some good weed' Even in class I've had someone come up to me and be, 'Hey! What's up, man' and give me a handshake and palm me a little bag of weed." Franco is not that guy. The following words he leans forward and whispers, as perhaps a star of Pineapple Express must "I haven't done drugs, I haven't even smoked pot, since high school."
After 'Freaks and Geeks' was canceled, Franco was the cast member who most quickly seemed to catch his stride. Within a few months, his performance as James Dean in a TV movie would win him a Golden Globe, and other good things would happen to him in his twenties. When he disparages his past movies, he is careful to make clear he is not talking about the SpiderMan trilogy, in which he played Peter Parker's best friend and secondgeneration Green Goblin, Harry Osborn. "It's not like I think I gave tremendous performances in those," he says, "but I'm happy to be part of that kind of phenomenon that I felt did the comicbook movie well…that made the most of that genre."
But mostly it was a decade of great efforts and huge disappointments. Franco recalls the moment in time when he had three big movies finished but yet to be released Flyboys, Tristan & Isolde, and Annapolis. "And I thought, 'Yeah! I got these three movies!' And then I saw them all." It wasn't just the time and sweat he had wasted onset. For Flyboys, a story of American World War I flying aces, he earned his pilot's license. For Annapolis, a tale of Naval Academy conflict, he did eight months of boxing training. And for Tristan & Isolde, a mythological tale of AngloIrish war, romance, and tragedy, "I did fucking sword fighting for eight months. What am I ever going to use that for And horseback riding." In the script, there was a battle scene on horseback, so Franco learned all these complicated horseback tricks. "Then we got to Prague, or Ireland, and they say, 'Oh yeah, that scene's been cut.' "
On his computer is all he has to show for those eight months of training a file entitled "Horse." Set to the soundtrack of "Seven Nation Army" is a series of riding tricks from his training. It's impressive stuff He jumps from one horse to another; stands on the back of a horse; does some kind of insane somersault mount. All, in the end, for this video. "It's just because I was so enthusiastic about acting," he says, as though he has no idea how he could have been quite so silly and mistaken. He hated the lesson that he was so painfully learning from these and other bad experiences "It doesn't matter how hard I work. I could work my ass off and it wouldn't translate into stuff I was proud of." Often he felt subjected to a kind of public humiliation. (Even now I'm not sure he fully appreciates that the commercial failure of those films he considers such a stain did at least carry with it a blessing Very few people have been witness to his greatest shames.)
While Franco may be a little hard on his past achievements, he does have a point. To watch the complete works of James Franco, as I did, is for large stretches of time a dispiriting experience. Not all of these films are calamitous, but again and again a movie that seems both plausibly worthwhile and potentially interesting reveals itself as something that will grind tediously and predictably for the next two hours. But though all these movies do have Franco's presence in common, it never feels as though he is in any way the saboteur dragging these films down. He seems more like a witness powerless to prevent the same crime being committed over and over again.
Franco took the role of James dean against the advice of most of those around him, and over their worries that he might be typecast, or just not match up to his subject. It worked, and announced his arrival as the latest heavyweight serious young actor. Looking back, perhaps it also marked the moment when things started to go askew. It's hard to tell which part of the James Dean experience had more effect on Franco—the intense study, research, and immersion he applied to playing Dean, or that by inhabiting Dean for the role he was permanently infected by Dean's own obsessive, singleminded, almost masochistically stubborn acting method. Either way, when Franco was next cast in a movie, as a homeless drug addict whose father is played by Robert De Niro, he was determined to push things as far as he could. "So on City by the Sea," he explains, "I slept on the streets and all that. Was it necessary or not Who's to say But I did it."
Along the way, Franco's determination, in service of his role, to do whatever he felt he had to do, and behave the way he felt he had to behave, would sometimes rub up against others.
"Look, certainly, I'll admit that," he says. "And I'm not proud of that." He shakes his head. "You really want to talk about all the bad times" He reluctantly tries to explain. "It was a lot of different factors. Yes, I was under the foolish impression that somehow I knew the right way to do things—_(a) _because of the research I did, (b) because partially the way I was trained as an actor was that I was told there's no great actor directors anymore." He'd been convinced that, because modern movies are so focused around technology, modern directors didn't know about acting. "You can print half of that and I'll sound like an idiot. I know it's completely false. But that's how I kind of went into it, thinking 'I've got to protect my performance, because they don't know and they'll make me look bad.' So I already went in there with a defensiveness, almost like it's got to be a fight. In most areas of my life there was very little conflict, except when I was working on a movie, and then it was just this enormous amount of stress and conict." It wasn't even fun. "It was a horrible way to work. I was miserable. I wanted to quit."
One early response to the lack of control he felt over the end result of his efforts was to make his own movies. With little hoopla, Franco has directed two movies from scripts he cowrote. If neither suggests that James Franco is yet destined to lead cinema forward into a radical new era, at the very least they are two more notches signaling his ambition and creative determination. The first of these, The Ape, is about a wouldbe writer who is surprised to find himself living with a talking ape. The second, Good Time Max, is a tale of two very different brothers. Franco plays the wayward one, who, in the movie's most unavoidably memorable scene, takes a shit on the other brother's carpet. He grins when I mention this. "You haven't seen that very often, have you" he says.
Franco alternates between talking about his present academic and creative life with gusto and pulling in the reins, fearful of how such talk may come across. When I ask him what he is proud of that he has done so far, he seems incredulous that I might mean any of his movies and instead offers, "I got a poetry honorable mention at UCLA," but when I try to ask him more about the poetry, he seems to shiver a little and is unwilling to elaborate. He knows how these things can seem. "It just sounds like, 'Oh, the actor's doing poetry,' " he demurs. "In that sense, it seems ridiculous to me. But I'm taking it as seriously as I can. I'm not calling up some café and saying, 'Hey! I'm James Franco, I'm going to read the poetry I wrote about my motorcycle.' I mean, I'm working with real poets. I'm doing it in as serious a way as I can."
Nonetheless, Franco agrees to let me accompany him to one of his classes, a threehour discussion that is part of his Experimental Fiction course, throughout which he attentively takes notes—connecting some words with arrows and drawing rough rectangles around others—and barely speaks. At least from this, he reasons, I might get to see that what he is doing here is real. "I just think about people who say, 'He's 30 years old and he's in college—how hard's that' " he says. "Well, I'm taking more classes than you ever took, so fuck you." A pause. "And I'm getting all A's."
As well as his regular classes, Franco has been continuing work on a novel he has been writing for the past two or three years. This, too, he's not comfortable discussing. "It's just something I've always been interested in and serious about," he says. "I just want it to be good. I'm sick of mediocre shit." He does put me in touch with the professor who has been supervising it, the novelist Mona Simpson, who tells me, of Franco's fiction in general, "It's strong, powerful stuff. A lot of it is based in Palo Alto, where he grew up. There's a lot of violence and brutality.… I remember one story about a young kid who was drunk or stoned, or probably both, driving home from a party, and actually hit somebody with the car and kept going. It's a very strong story." She notes also, "I think he is good at the interior lives of these young men somehow lost and disenfranchised and possibly dangerous. Young men who could fall into a dangerous life, or who could deal with it."
Franco was already deep into his UCLA studies while he was making the second of the two new movies he is proud to be involved with. In Milk, the tale of the pioneering gay San Francisco politician Harvey Milk, Franco is directed by one of the directors he most admires, Gus Van Sant, and acts opposite one of the actors he most admires, Sean Penn. Some days, he would fly to Los Angeles in the morning, attend classes, and fly back to shoot that night in San Francisco. Between shots, he would often study. (Franco says this worked fine, though one time when he was deep into reading a particular text, Sean Penn told him, "You're reading that book like you're waiting for it to lie to you.")
In Milk, Franco plays Scott Smith, who for many years was Harvey Milk's boyfriend. In filming a key moment between Franco and Penn, Van Sant was partially inspired by a work by the artist Douglas Gordon in which a man and a woman are filmed kissing. "It just looked very real," says Van Sant, who was surprised to discover that Franco, who has a keen interest in art and its practitioners, knew Gordon. He also knew that, in order to capture such a natural kiss on film, Gordon had cast two people who didn't know each other and instructed them to kiss for twelve hours. "Douglas was worried that he contributed to Sean and I having to kiss for twelve hours," says Franco. "It wasn't twelve hours, but it certainly felt like it. The rst kiss of the movie was out on Haight Street, with, like, 200 people watching, outside. It was a crane shot—I'm sure in the end it will be a really cool shot, but it starts close and then it takes maybe a minute. That's a long time on film with everybody watching and, like, a fake mustache getting in your mouth. It was long enough that you couldn't help thinking, 'Oh, my God, I'm kissing Spicoli.' "
One afternoon, I ask Franco about the research he did for Sonny, a minor but perfectly robust movie directed by Nicolas Cage in which Franco plays a New Orleans prostitute. After a failed attempt to get useful information from some female prostitutes on Santa Monica Boulevard—during which the hookers insisted on touching his penis, purportedly to establish that he was not an undercover cop—he went to New Orleans, where he was introduced to a guy who was supposedly a gigolo.
"There was a strip club on Bourbon Street," he begins. "I had only ever been to one strip club before I went to New Orleans to do that movie. But I started going to every strip club. There was one they advertise as 'Live Sex Shows' and I went in there and met a male stripper who said he was straight and that he serviced men and women. I later found out he didn't really tell the truth all the time. But I thought he was a good model for my part. And he was the guy I hung out with the most. He would do lap dances for people, and then in between we hung out in the back. So I was with him one night and this other guy came in. And this guy came in and said to my friend, 'Hey, man, I need you for a job right now—this guy wants two.' And he said, 'I'm hanging out with James doing research for this movie.' And the guy says, 'You're doing research Okay. You want to do real research. You're going to come down, come to the hotel. This guy's so out of his mind on coke, he won't even know what's going on. You just sit in the corner in the chair, take your shirt off, sit there, you can watch the whole thing.' I said, 'Okay.' "
Weren't you a bit worried about what you were getting yourself into
"Yeah. Heck, yes. But then I thought, 'Well, this is real research. I've got to do this for the role, man, I've got to do this.' But yeah, it was terrifying. Especially when I get there—this guy was a doctor, apparently. He was an older man. And they whip out the cocaine and they start doing cocaine on the desk and I'm like—am I incriminating myself I mean, I didn't do any of the cocaine. Okay I just went there to observe. So that was scary. It was in a nice hotel. The guy who took us over had a key to the room. So he just opened up and the doctor is just lying in the bed. And he wasn't completely naked when we got in there, but he certainly got naked."
And so where in the room did you go
"I was just standing over near the desk. And they all got in the bed and, I mean, he was out of his head. He was so high on cocaine, I guess, or drunk or whatever, and he was saying, like, 'Oh, my wife and daughters are coming tomorrow, but this is great.' It was the rst time I ever saw a cock ring. He put on a cock ring. And then they both kind of like stood over him, and the guy was, like, stroking both of them and he was like, 'Ah, all these cocks, I love these cocks.' " (Later, Franco would tell Cage about all this, and it would become the inspiration for when Cage's character in the movie, a pimp called Acid Yellow, snorts a line and then declares, "I love coke cock.")
And did you take your shirt off to, so to speak, be in the vibe
"Yeah, I guess I had my shirt off."
You must have felt This is a very weird thing to see.
"It was. It was mid, because on one hand, it was scary, strange to be there—you know, I've done bad things and I have been arrested but I have never been in that situation. So I was feeling all that, but then on the other hand it is just like a human interaction, so there's none of the movie music going on to heighten the situation. And so it had this strange, you know, casualness to it. Just people having sex, or about to have sex, and there I am standing in the room, you know. And so that was weird."
The movie itself was another for which Franco had high hopes. Inevitably, they were dashed. "It was a good experience," he remembers. "But it came out for about a week."
A few days after I leave Los Angeles, I receive what Franco describes as a "stupid email" that he has decided to write and then send without rereading. One of the issues he addresses is a conflict we had discussed between himself and Tyrese on the set of the film Annapolis. In Los Angeles, Franco had almost seemed despairing when I mentioned this, explaining that when the two of them had been in the boxing ring on the secondtolast day of shooting, Tyrese had thought that Franco deliberately punched him for real, something he wholeheartedly denies. Tyrese has subsequently linked this with Franco's Method tendencies and has continued to pillory Franco. ("I hear," Franco told me, "he wants to blow up my hotel room.") In his email Franco writes about how much he wishes there was a way to put the whole unfortunate incident behind him "I take full blame for any problems on that film. If he had a bad experience working with me, I was probably a jerk. I was not purposely cruel to him, but I was probably so wrapped up in my performance that I was not as friendly as I could have been. This is such a stupid issue I can't believe I'm still talking about it. But when I'm asked about it in the press it makes it seem as if it's still an issue. I think Tyrese is a sweet guy with a good heart. I wish him all the best."
In the email, Franco also expresses regret over the things we didn't have a chance to discuss "I felt like we didn't talk about writing or art as much as I would have liked, as those are what take up most of my life now. But if we didn't it's because I closed those subjects because I was uncomfortable about this forum as a place to discuss those things. Who wants to hear an actor talk about books or art No one. I just hope my interest in those areas, and my dedication to them, was apparent. But I know as an actor I'm not supposed to show interest in anything except charities and the environment. I don't know. I don't know what I'm supposed to show interest in. (By the way, we didn't talk about the work I do with orphans, but that's OK. Maybe the next article.)" He closes with the words "I am just rambling. Thanks."
Five minutes and thirtyseven seconds later, a second email arrives. It reads, in its entirety, "I know I take all this crap too seriously. I should learn from Seth just to take it easy."
It seems unlikely. Some people seem born to take things too seriously, and if taking things too seriously may sometimes cause needless upset and stain the path behind them, it may also bring them rewards and results rarely sought in this flabby gowiththeflow, followyourdream, findyourjoy era. If you act as though everything you do really matters, with all the time and thought and furrowing of brows that James Franco brings to his endeavors, there's always the chance that in the end it might.
Chris Heath is a** GQ **correspondent.