Edmund White: How are you?
James Franco: I’ve been learning to surf, and now I’m at the International Dance Academy on Hollywood Boulevard, about to take my hip-hop lesson.
EW: Are you going to be surfing and dancing in your next role?
JF: [Laughs.] It’s a kind of therapy for me. I’ve started a new chapter of my life. I was very work-addicted, and addicted to other things—not substances, I got over that a long time ago—but I’ve recently changed my life, and this is part of my therapy.
...EW: But there wasn’t that firm boundary between middle-class people and sex workers that there is now. People would run little ads in alternative newspapers like the East Village Other, and they would say, “I’ll come to your house and give you an oatmeal rubdown,” whatever that was, and then you’d hire them and they’d come and you’d have sex. And you’d lie around and talk afterwards, especially if you were stoned, and then you’d find out they were a law student. There was an early porn movie I saw that took place in trucks, and the truck driver was obviously middle-class because when he was getting a blow job he’d say, “Oh, excellent.” [Laughs.]
JF: Along those lines, and something we show in the series [The Deuce], is that Deep Throat was such a big hit, and the legend is that Jack Nicholson and Henry Kissinger were at the premiere. Suddenly porn was legitimized to a certain level, but up until then, a lot of the people, at least in straight porn, came from prostitution. What our show really tracks is how as streetwalkers the women needed pimps for protection, and were very dependent on them, and how that moved indoors, into the massage parlors, and the pimps started to become obsolete because the women didn’t need the same kind of protection because they weren’t outside anymore. Then post–Deep Throat, you got people moving to New York and then eventually Los Angeles and the Valley to be actors in porn without the intermediate step of prostitution. That was the second generation of people performing in porn—or, as you charmingly say, “posing” for porn. [Laughs.]
EW: How would you describe the character you play?
JF: I play twin brothers: Vincent and Frankie. I like to say I play the Harvey Keitel character in Mean Streets and I also play the Robert De Niro character in Mean Streets. One is the responsible brother and the other is the guy who can’t get it together. The real Vincent had this really interesting dilemma where he fell in love with this woman, Abby, who is intelligent, very smart. He comes from the streets. He’s street-smart, but she’s book-smart, and as he gets pulled deeper and deeper into the massage parlors, really just as a front man, she becomes more and more involved in feminism and eventually trying to help women get off the street. So he’s got this whole secret life that he has to keep from her, because he loves her so much but she is so against women being involved in the sex trade. Here’s the thing: In David Simon’s shows the bad guys also have a little goodness and the good guys are also bad, and so my guy Vincent, he’s a good guy at heart, but because he’s so good at what he does, he gets pulled deep into this whole underworld.
...EW: So are we going to lose you as an actor now?
JF: I’ve got to say, of all the things that I’ve done, and I’ve done a lot, the actual process of directing is the most fun, because you’re in the middle of all these different creative people. But no, I will not stop acting. Most actors come to a point in their lives where they have to reassess what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, and for me, after going back to school and trying to do all these other things, this new chapter, with surfing and dancing, is really about slowing down and trying to focus on fewer things but in a deeper, more quality-filled way.
I’m seguing, but I wanted to ask you: I have a very addictive personality. When I was a teenager I got over certain addictions, and that’s when I started acting, at age 17. I really threw myself into it, and that became everything, to the point where I didn’t even socialize. And then after, like, 10 years of that, at age 27, I realized, Man, I’m so depressed. On the surface my life seems pretty good—I have a career and everything—but I feel isolated and lonely. So then I threw myself into school, but again it was just this sort of running, running, running. So I went to Brooklyn College. I studied with Michael Cunningham and Amy Hempel. And anyway, I was going to ask you, because in the gay community it seems like there was, and maybe is, such an importance in this liberation that being free sexually is almost a political act. On the other hand, do you find that sort of sex-positive attitude can pull some people, if not a bunch of people, into a kind of sexual addiction? Because you can see the straight community sort of following suit nowadays with Tinder and this kind of app hookup culture. Do you notice a lack of intimacy, real intimacy between people?
EW: Yeah, I do. I’m writing a memoir now about my whole sex life. I’ve always wanted to write this book, but I was always afraid to write it. But I think your question is a very good one, because there are a lot of gay people who are sex-negative—the Larry Kramers of this world, all the people who were kind of monitoring everybody because of AIDS. But I think it’s all shifted to being online. I was teaching creative writing until this past May at Princeton, and I would say half of my students were into hookup culture. They would just have sex every weekend. They would get very drunk at these parties and fall into a big heap and thrash around—in a way because of feminism, since the whole thing of men courting women isn’t in anymore and it would just look absurd. So it’s fallen back into the hookup culture because they don’t know how else to get together. And the other half of my students are Christians who wear purity rings that their fathers put on their fingers in church. It’s like a marriage.
JF: Oh, my god.
EW: At least half my students are Christians and the other half are sluts. [Laughs.]
JF: Maybe it’s always been that way.
Read the full interview at Out.
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