James Franco is finally ready to share his side of the story in an in-depth interview with SiriusXM’s Jess Cagle.
In the interview — his first in nearly four years — Franco confronts the sexual misconduct allegations detailed in the Los Angeles Times in 2018, and subsequently in a 2019 lawsuit targeting his acting school.
Franco begins by explaining why he’s speaking out now.
“In 2018 there were some complaints about me and an article about me and at that moment I just thought, I’m gonna be quiet. I’m gonna be, I’m gonna pause. Did not seem like the right time to say anything,” he says. “There were people that were upset with me and I needed to listen.”
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As Franco explains, “The natural human instinct is to just make it stop. You just want to get out in front of it and whatever you have to do… apologize, you know, get it done. But what that doesn’t do is allow you to do the work, and to look at what was underneath, like, whatever you did… there’s probably an iceberg underneath that, of behaviour, of patterning, of just being blind to yourself that isn’t gonna just be solved overnight. So I’ve just been doing a lot of work. And I guess I’m pretty confident in saying like, four years, you know? And, I was in recovery before for substance abuse. And, there were some issues that I had to deal with that were also related to addiction. And so I’ve really used my recovery background to kind of start examining this and, and changing who I was.”
Franco also revealed that he’s battling sex addiction and has been in recovery since 2016.
“It’s such a powerful drug,” he says of sex. “And I got hooked on it for 20 more years. And the insidious part of that is that I stayed sober from alcohol all that time. So, and I went to meetings, you know, all that time. I even tried to sponsor other people. And so in my head, it was like, ‘Oh, I’m sober. I’m living a spiritual life.’ Where on the side, I’m acting out now in all these other ways. And I couldn’t see it.”
While he now recognizes his behaviour as addiction, at the time he felt it was merely something between consenting adults, but can now see he was “completely blind to power dynamics… but also completely blind to people’s feelings. I didn’t wanna hurt people… [but] the behaviour spun out to a point where it was like I was hurting everybody.”
During the interview, Franco also addresses comments made by longtime friend and frequent co-star Seth Rogen, who told the Sunday Times earlier this year that he has not worked with Franco since 2018, “and I do not plan to right now.”
“He was asked about me. And, I just wanna say, I absolutely love Seth Rogen…. ‘Cause a lot of people come up to me like… I love Seth Rogen. I worked with him for 20 years. We didn’t have one fight for 20 years. Not one fight. He was my absolute closest work friend, collaborator,” says Franco of Rogen, whom he met when the two were cast in “Freaks and Geeks” in 1999.
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“And we just gelled and what he said is true, we aren’t working together right now and we don’t have any plans to work together,” Franco continues. “Of course, it was hurtful in context but I get it. He had to answer for me because I was silent. He had to answer for me and I don’t want that. And so that’s why it’s one of the main reasons I wanted to talk to you today: I don’t want Seth or my brother [Dave Franco] or anyone to have to answer for me anymore.”
Additionally, Franco discusses his relationship with girlfriend Isabel Pakzad, how he used his fame as a “lure” and teaching an acting class he titled “Sex Scenes”, which he now views as “one of the stupidest things I did at the class…”
The full interview can be heard in its entirety on SiriusXM’s “The Jess Cagle Show” on SiriusXM Stars on Thursday, Dec. 23 at 2 p.m. ET.
