This is an archival story that predates current editorial management.
This archival content was written, edited, and published prior to LAist's acquisition by its current owner, Southern California Public Radio ("SCPR"). Content, such as language choice and subject matter, in archival articles therefore may not align with SCPR's current editorial standards. To learn more about those standards and why we make this distinction, please click here.
People always seem to think James Franco is gay (he certainly got enough jokes about it at his recent roast), as he tells The Daily Beast, he doesn't care.
At his roast, he got skewered by his friends for his botched Oscar hosting, perpetual squint and, no doubt inspired by his playing Harvey Milk's lover in Milk, plenty of zings about his sexuality. (Including one by Seth Rogen, who pointed out, "James became famous for playing James Dean, which makes sense, because they both sucked some dick and made three great movies.")
"I was like, "Great! Bring on the gay jokes!" because these aren't insults at all," Franco told the Daily Beast. "I don't even care if people think I'm gay, so it was like, 'Awesome! 'I mean, I wish I was … I wish I was gay."
Asked to explain why, he said, "I mean … we don't have to go into it." He did add, "There's a lot of conjecture.... My relationship with my public image over the past four or five years has just become weirder and weirder, because I look at it and it's me, and it's not me, so if other people want to use that for their own purposes or needs, I'm fine with it."
Aha, hear that Internet? You have just been given carte blanche to run with whatever crazy story you want about Franco.
During the interview, he also addressed his new film Child of God, based on the Cormac McCarthy novel, in which he plays a backwoods man who descends into necrophilia and murder. It's set for its U.S. debut at the New York Film Festival on September 29.
He explained that it's not his first brush with necrophilia. (Franco! Is there any subject, he won't tackle?) "Now that it's made and I look back on it, this is actually not my first necrophilia piece. I directed a short film called Herbert White with Michael Shannon while I was at NYU ... It's not that I, in my own life, find dead bodies particularly sexy or anything like that, but in a film, it allows you, in a very extreme way, to deal with a character whose imagination has gone to a crazy place. It also deals with loneliness, uncontrollable compulsion, as well as the artistic impulse."
The necrophilia jokes will be nuts at his next roast.
(Video is NSFW.)
