James Franco

• 1. Introduction

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  For five weeks, James Franco spent twelve hours a day in a gully built as a film set, and he left it only to use the lavatory. Between takes he read books, including academic textbooks, just to keep busy. The American actor and filmmaker was playing the mountain climber Aron Ralston in 127 Hours, a story about a man trapped alone in a Utah ravine with his hand pinned under a boulder. Franco later called the experience once-in-a-lifetime, and it earned him a Best Actor nomination at the 83rd Academy Awards. That kind of total immersion runs through his whole career, and it raises some odd questions. How does a teenager arrested for graffiti end up there? Why would a star keep returning to classrooms as a student? And what happens to a public image built on openness, ambition and constant attention when former students begin to speak?

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• 2. Teenage Trouble

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  James Edward Franco was born in Palo Alto, California, on the 19th of April 1978. His mother, Betsy Lou, writes children's books and acts now and then, and his father, Douglas Eugene, ran a Silicon Valley business. Franco has described the household as "academic, liberal, and largely secular". He grew up with two younger brothers, Tom and Dave, who both became actors. A family name had also changed along the way, because his maternal grandfather, Daniel, turned "Verovitz" into "Verne" at some point after 1940. His grandmother Mitzie then ran the well-known Verne Art Gallery in Cleveland, Ohio.

  At school Franco was a self-described "math whiz" who interned at Lockheed Martin and did well on the SAT. His father pushed him toward good grades, and he graduated from Palo Alto High School in 1996, acting in plays there. Yet he was also arrested for underage drinking and graffiti. He belonged to a group that stole designer fragrances from department stores and resold them to classmates. The arrests briefly made him a ward of the state. Facing the prospect of juvenile hall, he was given a second chance by the judge. He later said of those years, "It was teen angst. I was uncomfortable in my own skin. I was shy. I changed my ways just in time to get good grades."

  Marine zoology appealed to him as a career, but he had secretly always wanted to act and feared rejection. After a 1998 stint studying theater at CSSSA, he enrolled at UCLA as an English major. He quit after one year, against his parents' wishes, because he would have needed to wait two years to audition for the acting program. Instead he took lessons from Robert Carnegie at Playhouse West and worked a late-night shift at McDonald's, since his parents refused to pay his way. He practiced accents on the customers, and in 2015 he looked back on it fondly in a Washington Post editorial titled "McDonald's was there for me when no one else was".

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• 3. Breakout Roles

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  After 15 months of training, Franco booked his first paid job, a Pizza Hut commercial featuring a dancing Elvis Presley. Guest spots on television followed, and then in 1999 came a leading part in the NBC series Freaks and Geeks. He played Daniel Desario in a show that ran only 18 episodes before low viewership ended it. Audiences later turned it into a cult favorite. Franco has recalled that he improvised constantly on set, even when the camera was not on him. He admitted, "I would improvise even if the camera wasn't on me", and said it was not yet productive.

  The 2001 television film James Dean, directed by Mark Rydell, demanded far more. Franco went from non-smoker to two packs of cigarettes a day, bleached his dark brown hair blond, and learned motorcycle riding, guitar and bongos. He also spent hours with two of Dean's associates and cut off contact with family, friends and his girlfriend. "It was a very lonely existence," he said. Ken Tucker of Entertainment Weekly wrote that Franco "gets under the skin of this insecure, rootless young man." The role brought a Golden Globe Award, plus Emmy and Screen Actors Guild nominations.

  Worldwide fame arrived with the 2002 film Spider-Man, in which Franco played Harry Osborn, best friend of Peter Parker and son of the Green Goblin, played by Willem Dafoe. He had originally been considered for the lead role of Spider-Man himself. The film took in $114 million in its opening weekend in North America and $822 million worldwide. Spider-Man 2 in 2004 earned $783 million, and Spider-Man 3 in 2007 reached $891 million, still his highest-grossing film.

  Between those blockbusters he kept preparing physically. For City by the Sea, he lived on the streets for several days to understand his homeless character. For Annapolis he did eight months of boxing training. For Tristan & Isolde he practiced horseback riding and sword fighting, and for Flyboys he completed training for a Private Pilot Licence. In 2007 he made a cameo as himself in Knocked Up, alongside fellow Freaks and Geeks alumni Seth Rogen, Jason Segel and Martin Starr.

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• 4. Partnership With Rogen

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  The 2008 stoner comedy Pineapple Express was co-written and co-starred by Seth Rogen and produced by Judd Apatow. Franco played Saul, a pot dealer. Apatow said that Franco returns with a three-dimensional character you totally believe exists, taking it very seriously even in comedy. In the New York Times, critic Manohla Dargis called him "delightful as Saul, loosey-goosey and goofy yet irrepressibly sexy." The role brought a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy. High Times magazine also named him its Stoner of the Year.

  That same year Franco appeared in Gus Van Sant's Milk, opposite Sean Penn, Josh Brolin and Emile Hirsch. He played Scott Smith, the boyfriend of Harvey Milk, who is played by Penn. Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times called him a nice match for Penn as the lover who finally has enough of political life. Franco won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Actor. He also hosted Saturday Night Live on the 20th of September 2008, and again on the 19th of December 2009.

  Rogen and Franco kept working together. In This Is the End, released in late 2013, they play fictionalized versions of themselves, stuck in a house during an apocalypse with Jay Baruchel, Craig Robinson, Jonah Hill and Danny McBride. The Interview in 2014 landed at the center of real diplomatic tension between the United States and North Korea, tied to the 2014 Sony hacking incident. Sausage Party followed in 2016.

  Their most acclaimed project was The Disaster Artist, which Franco directed, co-produced and starred in. It adapts Greg Sestero's book about the making of The Room, a film many consider among the worst ever made. Franco played Tommy Wiseau, the star, director, screenwriter and producer of that film, while his brother Dave played Sestero. Franco stayed in character as Wiseau for the entire shoot. The Disaster Artist opened on the 1st of December 2017 to positive reviews, and Franco's portrayal earned near-universal praise and a Golden Globe for Best Actor. At the end of 2017, almost 40, he said he was slowing down to focus on himself.

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• 5. Perpetual Student

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  In autumn 2006, dissatisfied with the direction of his career, Franco re-enrolled at UCLA as an English major with a creative writing concentration. He won permission to take as many as 62 course credits per quarter, when the normal limit was 19. Some credits came from independent study tied to his work on the set of Spider-Man 3. He earned his degree in June 2008 with a 3.5 grade point average on a 4.0 scale. His departmental honors thesis was a novel, supervised by Mona Simpson.

  UCLA chose him as commencement speaker for the 12th of June 2009. Several months earlier, an editorial in the student newspaper questioned his "caliber", and a student started a Facebook page protesting the choice. On the 3rd of June he withdrew, citing a date conflict with location pre-production on a film. On the 26th of January 2011, Franco and the Harvard Lampoon released a satirical video on Funny or Die mocking that last-minute cancellation.

  Next he moved to New York and studied at several schools at once. He attended Columbia University School of the Arts for writing, New York University's Tisch School of the Arts for filmmaking, and Brooklyn College for fiction. He also joined the low-residency poetry MFA program at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. He received his M.F.A. from Columbia in 2010. As of 2010 he was in the Ph.D. program in English at Yale University, and he has also attended the Rhode Island School of Design.

  A grade at NYU became a lawsuit. On the 23rd of September 2010, Franco told Showbiz411 that he had received a "D" in an acting class. In fact the grade was in a class called "Directing the Actor". Professor José Angel Santana alleged that Franco had not earned his marks and was passed because of celebrity. After Santana lost his position, he sued for defamation in September 2012, and the two settled in September 2013. Franco said on the Howard Stern Show that he had agreed on the D in advance because 127 Hours would make him miss most classes.

  Franco also taught. In 2011 he led a graduate-level film course at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, and he has taught at USC and UCLA. He gave a screenwriting class on Skillshare too. Actors including Seth MacFarlane, Kate Mara, Natalie Portman, Chloë Sevigny, Kristen Wiig and Olivia Wilde appeared in his students' films. In March 2013, UCLA ran half-page print advertisements featuring its famous alumnus under the tagline "Some A-Listers Actually Get A's".

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• 6. Art Beyond Acting

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  On the 19th of October 2010, Scribner published Palo Alto, a collection of short stories by Franco named for his hometown. It drew on his own teenage memories and on ones written by students at Palo Alto Senior High School. The stories follow teenagers who drive drunk, smoke marijuana and slide into spontaneous violence. Reviews split sharply. The Los Angeles Times said he had spent too much time on style and virtually none on substance, while The Guardian called it a promising debut. Publishers Weekly was harsher, calling the 11 stories amazingly underwhelming.

  Painting came earlier than any of it. Franco developed his skill at the California State Summer School for the Arts, and says he has painted longer than he has acted. His canvases first hung publicly at the Glü Gallery in Los Angeles, from the 7th of January to the 11th of February 2006. In June 2010 his first solo exhibition, "The Dangerous Book Four Boys", opened at The Clocktower Gallery in New York City, with video, drawings, sculptures and installation. A first European show followed in 2011 at Peres Projects in Berlin.

  His soap opera work doubled as an art project. On General Hospital, Franco played a multimedia artist named Franco who comes to Port Charles for an exhibition and becomes obsessed with Jason Morgan, played by Steve Burton. Franco called the role performance art. In summer 2010, the fictional Franco held an exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, while the real Franco showed work there based on the experience.

  As a director, Franco screened As I Lay Dying, from William Faulkner's novel, at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. Child of God, from Cormac McCarthy's 1973 novella, began shooting in February 2012 and competed at the 70th Venice Film Festival. The Broken Tower, a 90-minute black-and-white docudrama about poet Hart Crane, began as his master's thesis. With Gus Van Sant he made Unfinished at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, built from outtakes of My Own Private Idaho. In 2012 he released an EP, MotorCity, as part of the duo Daddy. His first poetry collection, Directing Herbert White, came from Graywolf Press in April 2014 and borrows its title from a poem by his mentor Frank Bidart.

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• 7. The Attention Game

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  On the 27th of February 2011, Franco and Anne Hathaway hosted the 83rd Academy Awards, chosen to draw a younger audience. The telecast was widely panned, and some reviewers called it the worst in history. Critics saw discontent and low energy from Franco. On the Late Show with David Letterman he answered, "It was never on my list of things to do. It doesn't mean I didn't care and it doesn't mean I didn't try, right?" Asked about claims that he seemed stoned, he joked that "the Tasmanian Devil would look stoned standing next to Anne Hathaway."

  He was already a magnet for coverage. Salon named him the Sexiest Man Living in 2009, and the press fixated on his habit of attending college. In a 2011 interview he objected, saying "I'm not going to school to get articles written about me." He added that he writes, makes movies and takes his projects seriously. Saturday Night Live even parodied his complaints about misquotation in a Weekend Update segment.

  Franco embraced the attention game rather than fleeing it. In December 2013 he wrote a New York Times article defending his stream of selfies. His argument was blunt: "Attention is power." That same year he took the cover of Man of the World, and on the 8th of March 2013 he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6838 Hollywood Boulevard. He also played the gangster "Alien" in Spring Breakers, and the studio A24 campaigned for a Best Supporting Actor nomination.

  In 2014 he made his Broadway debut as George in a revival of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men at the Longacre Theatre. A Chicago company, Under the Gun Theater, staged a 2015 show titled Dear James Franco that used improvisation to satirize letters written to or by celebrities.

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• 8. Allegations and Aftermath

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  In 2014, a seventeen-year-old girl posted screenshots on Instagram of alleged messages between her and Franco, who was then 35. They showed him trying to arrange a hotel meeting after she said she was seventeen. Franco admitted on Live! With Kelly and Michael that he had written them. He and his supporters noted that New York's age of consent is seventeen. He first tweeted, "I HOPE PARENTS KEEP THEIR TEENS AWAY FROM ME. Thank you." Later he said he was embarrassed and had "learned my lesson."

  At the 2018 Golden Globe Awards, Franco wore a Time's Up pin in support of the MeToo movement. Actress Ally Sheedy immediately criticized him on social media, hinting she had quit acting after working with him on a play. On the 9th of January 2018, The New York Times canceled a planned event about The Disaster Artist. On the 10th, Franco told Stephen Colbert the accusations made on Twitter were "not accurate". The next day the Los Angeles Times reported that five women accused him of inappropriate or exploitative behavior while he was their acting teacher or mentor. His attorney, Michael Plonsker, disputed the allegations.

  On the 3rd of October 2019, two former students of his acting school, Studio 4, filed a lawsuit against him and his partners. They alleged the program tried to create a pipeline of young women who were sexually exploited in the name of education. They claimed students were pressured into nude auditions and simulated sex acts, and had to sign away rights to recordings. Franco denied the claims through his attorney. A second action, a class-action case brought by approximately 1,500 students, alleged fraud.

  In June 2021, the settlement terms emerged. Franco would pay more than $2.2 million to resolve both disputes, with $894,000 going to the two women who cited sexual exploitation. The joint statement said the defendants continued to deny the allegations but acknowledged that the plaintiffs had raised important issues. Charlyne Yi, who worked with him on The Disaster Artist, said filmmakers answered their attempt to quit by offering a bigger role, which Yi viewed as an attempted bribe. In May 2021 Seth Rogen said he does not condone abuse or harassment and would no longer work with Franco.

  On the 23rd of December 2021, in his first interview in nearly four years, Franco admitted to having had sex with students on the Jess Cagle Podcast. He said he had undergone treatment for sexual addiction since 2016. He did not address other allegations. Work has continued at a reduced scale. In August 2022 he was cast as Fidel Castro in Alina in Cuba, later retitled Castro's Daughter, a choice supported by Castro's daughter. His film Hey Joe premiered at the Rome Film Festival in October 2024. In May 2025, Deadline reported that Franco would play the detective hunting Joseph James DeAngelo, played by Vincent Gallo, in Golden State Killer.

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