SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2017 GQ.COM.AU 187
F
ranco grew up in Palo Alto, a well-
to-do city in San Francisco’s Bay
Area. His mother, Betsy, is a novelist
and sometimes actor, and his father,
Douglas, ran a tech company that
secured shipping containers, until he
passed away in 2011. Franco has two
younger brothers – 32-year-old Dave,
who you probably know and 36-year-
old Tom, who you probably don’t. Franco was a smart kid,
good at maths, but he was awkward and unsure in his skin.
“I got in a lot of trouble when I was a teenager, “ he says.
“I didn’t know how to interact with people. I felt different.
But partying was the answer. It made me feel OK, like
I could be among other people.”
He had a few run-ins with the law early on. Minor things
- underage drinking and graffiti, stealing from department
stores – but enough to realise he had to straighten himself out.
“I couldn’t hang out with my friends anymore because I’d
always get in trouble with them,” he says. “So there I was –
alone again, an outsider, not able to fit in the world. That’s
when I started acting.”
Franco had found his home. He started taking
classes at the renowned Playhouse West acting school
and supported himself with a late-night shift at
McDonald’s, where he practised accents on customers.
He landed a Pizza Hut commercial and a handful of small
TV roles. Then in 1999 he got his first big break when
Judd Apatow cast him in cult TV series Freaks and Geeks
alongside Seth Rogen and Jason Segel.
From there, he scored a role as James Dean in a TV biopic,
and as Peter Parker’s best friend, Harry Osborn, in
Spider-Man. He played Robert De Niro’s junkie son in City
by the Sea, and then came Spider-Man 2. Suddenly, his career
was taking off.
The offers kept pouring in: as Sean Penn’s boyfriend in
Oscar-winner Milk and Allen Ginsberg in Howl; he was cast
as Julia Roberts’ love interest in literary blockbuster Eat
Pray Love and then delivered perhaps his most acclaimed
performance to date, as hapless adventurer Aron Ralston in
127 Hours, for which he received an Oscar nomination.
He didn’t win, but he didn’t care. He had to keep moving.
Franco took on more work. He was holding art exhibitions
of video work and teaching acting classes at UCLA and
NYU. He enrolled in a PhD course to study English at Yale
University. He wrote a book of short stories, a collection of
poetry and that novel, Actors Anonymous. He was directing
projects and producing others.
He appeared as artist-cum-serial killer, Franco, in soap
opera General Hospital, whose 20 episodes he filmed in just
three days. He starred in The Interview, the film about the
assassination of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, which
led to a minor international crisis and the notorious Sony
email hack. He hosted the Oscars. He appeared as unhinged
porn producer Joe in King Cobra, his latest gay role on screen.
More movies. More side-projects, always more and more.
And that’s how we ended up here, in 2017, with 17 projects in
the can and a few more on the way.
It is everything you might imagine a movie star’s career
could be. Enough fame to have a name for yourself, but the
freedom to pick and choose the jobs you want. Hollywood
has always been a tricky game, but Franco’s career seemed to
prove that if you play your cards right you really can do it all
and have it all.
But Franco recently discovered another truth to
Hollywood. Something they don’t tell you when you’re
enjoying the parties and fancy hotel rooms. The caramel-
topped almond lattes, delivered just so. The private planes
and premieres and all the other trimmings that come with
being a movie star. Franco found that it might offer you a life
of unimaginable fame and fortune, but Hollywood is not
your friend. And it will eat you alive.
L
ast year was a big year. Not just
for Franco, but for many people.
On the morning of November 8, the
American public went to the polls,
most expecting to end the night with
Hillary Clinton delivering a victory
speech. The story is old news now,
but things did not go according to
plan. You can’t help but feel that
watching Trump win – especially after a campaign in which
he’d railed against people like Franco, branding Hollywood
a town of ‘elites’ and ‘snowflakes’ – must have hit hard.
“I feel like it’s not a total coincidence that I hit my own
personal wall at the time that I did – last November,”
says Franco. “I think a lot of people have been questioning
their lives lately in the States and what they’re doing,
how they’re living.”
And there’s no denying the way Franco was living was
crazy, whichever way you look at it. The stories of his multi-
tasking are the stuff of legend. Co-stars remarking how he
would sit down to work on side-projects between takes.
There’s a lot of downtime on set, so he’d pass the time
reading Ulysses or working on a novel. That’s what Franco
told interviewers, anyway. That’s what he told himself.
“He’s making use of every single moment,” Why Him?
director John Hamburg told Rolling Stone last year. “The
other day he was in hair and make-up, typing on a laptop.
I said, ‘What are you doing, writing a novel?’ He said, ‘Yep’.
And he actually was!”
Of course he was. He’s James Franco. But he began to
realise that the more he worked, the more he felt there was
something missing. That, while acting had made him feel
safe all those years ago as a shy teen, the feelings of isolation
had never really gone away. He’d just learnt to hide them.
“It was a gradual thing,” he says, looking back. “I hadn’t
been in a relationship in a long time and was, like, realising
how much I was running from feelings and people. And how
much of my identity was wrapped up in work.
“I knew who I was on a movie set. But take me away from
that and it’s like, oh shit, I have to interact with people outside
of the dynamics of a movie set? That’s really scary.
“But as soon as I took a step back and stopped working, it
was like, holy shit. All the feelings flooded in and it was like
this is what I was running from. This is what I was using
work to hide from. This is why I had to occupy myself every
minute of the day, 24 hours a day. Because I was running,
running from emotions and being vulnerable and being
around people. Being myself.”
