James Franco didn’t take the rocky reviews of his Oscars hosting gig too well — according to actor and comedian Paul Rust, that is, who said he saw Franco lose it on set days after his infamous awards night back in 2011.
Rust said on a Dec. 27 podcast episode of his With Gourley and Rust show that he “saw James Franco flip out once,” per Variety.
Rust said that the alleged incident took place in 2011 during promotion for Franco’s film Your Highness, not long after Franco co-hosted the 83rd Academy Awards alongside Anne Hathaway. (Unfortunately for the pair, their hosting work was widely panned, with The Hollywood Reporter brutally writing, “In what could go down as one of the worst Oscar telecasts in history, a bad and risky idea proved out in spectacularly unwatchable fashion.”)
Rust said Franco was tapped to do promo for Your Highness with CollegeHumor, “and the idea was that a group of nerds are playing Dungeons and Dragons with the stars of Your Highness, James Franco and Danny McBride,” while noting that production took place “literally two days” after the Oscars.
“He was upset because the reviews were not good. He was in a bad mood,” Rust alleged, while claiming Franco delivered an “unusable” performance on set while mumbling and keeping his head down.
When the director of the promo asked Franco, “What was that? What are you doing?” the actor only became more “upset,” Rust claimed, and went “off-script” during the next take of the promo, which poked fun at his “Renaissance man” persona.
“It comes to James Franco, and he goes, ‘My character is James Franco, and he’s been getting into cooking chorizo.’ So, it’s sort of like he has to be self-effacing here, so that’s also part of the problem,” Rust recalled. “And so, he starts doing ad-libs about other things that people say about James Franco. So he goes, but in the mumble voice … ‘James Franco was high on heroin when he was hosting the Oscars last night.’”
Rust — who clarified that he didn’t think Franco had been high — said a publicist then intervened, reminding the actor that the cameras were rolling and he “shouldn’t be saying” what he said.
While Rust said McBride tried to make Franco feel better by telling him, “If you don’t want to do this, I don’t want you to feel forced that you have to do this,” he said the actor eventually left the set altogether.
“And then I see, it reaches a point where I see James Franco stand up, kick a chair and storm out of the stage,” Rust claimed, saying that Franco “never came back” and the promo was never released.
