HYPEBy Gillian Shen
He’s certainly an almost maniacal multitasker and his to-do lists are extremely long, so don’t hold your breath. From studying for multiple post-graduate degrees, filming movies, appearing in TV series, writing books, holding art exhibitions, to lecturing at New York University (NYU) soon, he might as well be a Duracell Bunny.
In case you’re wondering, James Franco is definitely not that bunny in the commercials, eternally beating a drum. Instead, you may remember him playing the lead role in 127 Hours or perhaps as Harry Osborn from the Spiderman trilogy.
His story begins at Palo Alto High School, where he graduated in 1996. Already keen on acting, the then 18-year-old starred in school plays. He also did extremely well for his Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). A picture-perfect student, then? Not quite. In an interview on Inside the Actors Studio, Franco admitted to stealing cologne in his high school days. “We’d keep them (cologne sample bottles) in our gym locker at school and we’d sell some from the lockers”.
Thankfully, Franco did not make that a career choice. Instead, he entered the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he majored in English. However, while he stayed out of trouble from the law, he did not stay in school. After a year, he dropped out to pursue acting. Meanwhile, Franco began working the night shift at a McDonald’s restaurant, where he stopped being a vegetarian, and began practising accents on customers who swung by.
His efforts eventually paid off when he was casted for a lead role in the TV series Freaks and Geeks. While the show grinded to a halt after just 18 episodes, it became one of Time magazine’s top 100 greatest shows of all time in 2007 – 7 years after ceasing production. Also worth mentioning is his Golden Globe-winning role in the biographical film James Dean, a stellar example of his commitment as an actor. In his pursuit to accurately portray Dean, Franco went from non-smoker to puffing 2 packs a day. He even became socially inactive, cutting contact from family and friends. Franco even told The Guardian, “”I got it into my head that I needed to be isolated and so told my girlfriend at the time that I wouldn’t be talking to her for four months,”
Roles in other movies have also seen him studying for a pilot’s licence, doing boxing for 8 months, and even another 8 months of sword fighting and horseback riding.
But his most successful work can indeed be 127 Hours, which earned him 7 awards and 15 other nominations. A real-life tale of Aron Ralston, a climber who is forced to amputate his own arm to survive after it got trapped under a boulder. “He (Ralston) showed us the real videos he had made (while stuck in the canyon)…on those videos, it’s Aron in the middle of the situation, not knowing that he’s going to get out. That Aron doesn’t know that there’s a happy ending. So as an actor, it’s not only that I’m listening to what he’s saying, I’m trying to absorb the behavior, because it’s the behavior of a guy who thinks he’s going to die and is trying to put on a dignified front for his friends and family because he doesn’t want to wallow in self pity in the last messages he’s going to give them”, Franco recalls in an interview with the film blog, In Contention.
These days, aside from acting, he plays many other parts within the film industry, from screenwriting to producing. But that’s not all. According to Entertainment Weekly, Franco, “who has more degrees than a thermometer”, will be teaching at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. His lucky group of 10 to 12 students will learn how to adapt poetry to short films for 1 semester. He has not forgotten about studying, either.
In 2006, he returned to UCLA to complete the English major he left behind. He is currently a student at the prestigious Yale University, where he is studying for a doctorate in English. He even reads in between film takes.
“There’s a lot of downtime on set, so instead of watching TV or hanging around, I read”, he said in an interview with The Guardian.
With this Hollywood A-lister and academic go-getter being under the limelight, the down-to-earth Franco who used to work at McDonald’s still exists. As In Contention also discovered, Franco is seemingly the male equivalent of a plain Jane. “He wears a simple leather jacket, unremarkable jeans, dirty white sneakers — just a guy”. You’ll easily find pictures of him sound asleep during at lecture at Columbia University on the Internet too.
Perhaps studying, or reading for that matter, keeps his life on track. For one, travelling to and fro from school to film sets sounds far more respectable than joining other celebrities in drug rehabilitation centres. Danny Boyle, his director in the film 127 Hours seems to agree.
He told The Telegraph, “I was worried about his sanity… He spent five weeks in that gully, every day, six days of the week, 9 am to 9 pm, with breaks for the lavatory. He dealt with it by reading Proust and academic textbooks. He got through them at a staggering pace. I think it helped keep him sane.”
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