Something a bit different from the Sundance Film Festival. James talks about his stint on General Hospital.

For months we’ve obsessed over the reasons behind James Franco’s bizarre-but-fascinating decision to join the cast of General Hospital as a murderous artist named Franco. So when we ran into the coy actor Monday night at a Cinema Society screening of his Sundance-bound Allen Ginsberg biopic, Howl, we asked for — nay, demanded! — a straightforward explanation for his soap-opera move. And he finally gave it to us.

The idea came to him while preparing a second movie with the artist Carter. The new film (which will also feature Catherine Keener) is called Maladies, and Franco plays a former soap star. “Now, just because I’m playing a character who was formerly on a soap opera doesn’t mean I had to go on a soap opera, right?” said Franco. “So going on General Hospital isn’t directly related to Maladies. But we got to talking, like, ‘Hey, what if I really did a soap opera? That would be kind of amazing!’”

It turns out Franco has been a soap fan for a long time. “I was home sick a lot because I didn’t like school when I was little,” he said. “So if I wasn’t watching my VHS copy of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, or Whoopi Goldberg’s movie Jumping Jack Flash — because those were the only two movies we had the foresight to record — I guess I was watching soap operas.” So he called up the folks at General Hospital, who were, of course, ecstatic. He only gave them one bit of direction: “I said, ‘I want to play an artist, and I want him to be crazy.’ And they wrote this character that was better than I could have ever asked for. It was their idea to call the character Franco. I said, ‘That’s crazy. Thank you.’” It was only after he’d signed up that he decided to bring his own crew along to film the filming, he said, “because I wanted to really have ownership over the piece.” (This footage would be part of his yet-to-be-confirmed performance-art show at Deitch Projects’ Long Island City space this spring. And, in true meta form, that show might in turn be taped for a special episode of General Hospital.)

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