Paul Rust said in a recent episode of the “With Gourley and Rust” podcast that he saw James Franco “flip out” on a set a few days after he co-hosted the 2011 Oscars with Anne Hathaway.
“I saw James Franco flip out once,” Rust claimed. “When ‘Your Highness’ came out, CollegeHumor was going to try to do some promotion, 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.”
Rust noted that “this was literally two days after [Franco] had hosted the Oscars. So he was upset because the reviews were not good. He was in a bad mood.”
Franco co-hosted the Oscars ceremony in February 2011. At the time, he was also promoting “Your Highness,” the David Gordon Green-directed stoner comic fantasy film, which was released in theaters in April of that year.
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The comedian recalled that, during the first take for the CollegeHumor promo, Franco had “his head down” and was “mumbling all of his lines,” making the footage was “unusable.” According to Rust, the director then told Franco, “What was that? What are you doing?”
“The director comes over and gives him that, and that makes James Franco more upset. So, in the next take, he starts going off-script, and he goes — and it’s also, like, the script is about, it’s the joke that he’s probably tired of, which is James Franco, Renaissance man,” Rust said. “So, the premise was, each person picks their character and goes, ‘My character is Skibby the Great, and he’s a warlock who has these powers.’ And then 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. And so, he starts doing ad-libs about other things that people say about James Franco. So he goes, but in the mumble voice — he’s still doing the mumbling thing, so he’s got his head down — he goes, ‘James Franco was high on heroin when he was hosting the Oscars last night.’”
He continued, “Then the publicist comes in and, like, leans down and goes, ‘Why are you saying that? The camera is on you right now. You shouldn’t be saying that.’”
Rust said he could “faintly remember” that, when Franco hosted the Oscars, people were saying, “What is this guy high the way he’s acting?” He added, “I don’t know if they were saying he was high on heroin. And for the record, I don’t think he was high.”
When his podcast co-host Matt Gourley asked how Danny McBride behaved during the whole situation on set, Rust said McBride was “a sweetheart.”
“Between takes, he’s saying to James Franco, ‘Hey, if you don’t want to do this, I don’t want you to feel forced that you have to do this,’” Rust recalled. “But [Franco] keeps doing it. 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 said Franco “never came back” and, although the production tried to reconfigure the project, he believes it never “saw the light of day.”
Variety has reached out to Franco’s reps for comment.
The 83rd annual Academy Awards received negative reviews from both critics and viewers, with many mentioning Franco and Hathaway’s roles as co-hosts. “The youth movement in this year’s choice of Oscar hosts didn’t alter the show’s dynamics, from the opening insert-actors-in-montage sequence (hello, Billy Crystal) to the stiff, awkward banter between James Franco and Anne Hathaway throughout,” reads Variety‘s review of the 2011 ceremony. “While Melissa Leo dropped an ‘f-bomb’ early on, the ‘f’ words best describing the proceedings would be ‘flat,’ ‘fumbling’ and ‘familiar’ — proving it takes more than a new coat of paint to invigorate a ceremony that easily flummoxes innovation. Given the multiple technical wins for “Inception,” perhaps we should write off this Oscarcast as a bad dream.”