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When it comes to kissing, Julia Roberts is ‘not bad’ according to her Eat Pray Love co-star James Franco.

The 32-year-old jokingly tells USA Today he ‘didn’t mind’ kissing the Pretty Woman actress.

But Glee creator Ryan Murphy – who directed Eat Pray Love – swears the actor only accepted the role because he got to kiss Roberts.

Murphy says: ‘He really wanted to kiss Julia Roberts.

‘He told me that was the reason. I was like: ‘Wait I thought it was my brilliant script’.’

Franco denies that puckering up with Roberts, 42, was his motivation but he does say he had to encourage the actress to dive into their initial love scene.

‘The first day in the first scene shot for the film, I leaned in to kiss her and she said: ‘Oh, I don’t know if we should do that the first day’,’ he says.

‘I said: ‘Well, take it or leave it but I think it is important to the movie and the story’.

‘She said something like: ‘All right, the kid flew all the way from Ireland. We might as well do it’.’

Asked what kissing the Pretty Woman was like, Franco says: ‘Not bad. I didn’t mind.’

Source.

“Is James Franco for Real?” That was the question posed in the July 25 cover story of New York magazine that focused on the mercurial actor whose latest film, Eat Pray Love, opens Friday.

The author of the piece, book critic Sam Anderson, comes off as part serious investigator, part fawning fan who is reduced to following the actor into a New York University bathroom to do an interview and later is frustrated that Franco can’t talk more to him since he has a previous commitment with another publication.

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These two are adorable together! I’ll try and add caps asap.

In the September issue, we take a look at prolific cover subject James Franco from five different perspectives — as a profile, a short story, a personal history, an art exhibition, and even a poem. His brother Dave is also an actor. And a filmmaker. So we gave him an assignment at the photo shoot: Make a funny video. Or five.
By Dave Franco

Source.

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James is featured on the cover of the September issue of Esquire! Here’s the interview, along with a few gorgeous outtakes.

GALLERY LINK:
- Photoshoots > Outtakes > Session #40

Sure, he hasn’t had his eggs yet, but it’s got to be said: James Franco looks a little ragged along the seams at 8:45 in the morning. Unshaven. Inky at his edges and out of sorts. The brown T-shirt hangs on his shoulders like the wind blew it there. He’s catfooted and somehow goofy of gait. And that mustache is a wish.

He generally fits the bill of a vaguely hungover, Lower East Side, semi-academic hipster artist living the unraveling agenda of Tuesday-morning being and nothingness. He sits by a side door near a pail of mop water. There’s a paperback, palm-pinched, cover down, in his right hand, and a big plastic shopping bag full up with something he doesn’t want to show just yet. When asked what he’s reading, Franco smiles his ungrudgingly adolescent smile, a grin as terminally satisfying as the last healthy squeeze on a tube of toothpaste. He is engaging, for just a second, in the mutual diction of actor and artist — “It’s for a project,” he says. But the word — project — thumps out of him unprecious and without bluster, as if he were naming a day of the week. He’s always got something going. He flips the book over. Twilight.

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Pretty lengthy, and interesting, interview James had with New York Magazine.

Movie star, conceptual artist, fiction writer, grad student, cipher—he’s turned a Hollywood career into an elaborate piece of performance art. But does it mean anything? A critical investigation, with bathroom break.

1. The Wink
“Franco is here. And he is seriously good looking, but very weird.”
“Weird how?”
—Maxie and Lulu, General Hospital, November 23, 2009

James Franco will not stop bouncing around. We’re standing on the sixth floor of a building at NYU, in the Department of Cinema Studies, outside a small theater. He’s wearing a standard grad-student uniform: washed-out jeans, charcoal sweater, gray sneakers, messy hair. His face—the face whose sculpted smoothness has won him countless film roles, and a Gucci endorsement, and daily floods of heartsick prose poetry on Internet comment boards—has been abducted by a mildly disturbing mustache. (He had to grow it for a role, he says.) We’ve just finished listening to a lecture by the performance artist Marina Abramovic—a talk Franco introduced with a charming but rambling overview of Abramovic’s career: the time she screamed herself hoarse, the time she took medication to give herself seizures, the time she cut her own hand with a knife, the time she ate an entire raw onion. It’s unclear whether people have come tonight to see Abramovic or Franco or just the symbiotic fusion of the two—this rare public marriage of Hollywood and art-world stars.

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“Good Morning America” weekend co-anchor Bianna Golodryga recently sat down with award-winning actor James Franco in Los Angeles, where he was filming a scene for “General Hospital” at the Pacific Design Center. Reprising his role as artist “Franco,” the actor discussed what draws him to the structure of soap operas, telling Golodryga, “…there are performances with different levels of intension, different levels of being genuine, that can get audiences thinking in a different way than just about a fictional story. And I thought…if I went on a soap opera, maybe that would add something, maybe that would shake something up.” He also discussed his return to school and his reputation as a “renaissance man,” who’s not only an actor but a director, producer, and artist as well.

The interview will air on “Good Morning America” on Saturday, July 17, 2010.

Julia Roberts may have played leading lady to a host of superstars, but she still hasn’t gotten used to doing between-the-sheets scenes on camera, at least according to her “Eat Pray Love” co-star, James Franco.

“She is very, very outgoing,” James told Parade.com. “But I think she’ll also admit pretty freely that she doesn’t love to do love scenes and actually was charmingly shy when we had to do them.”

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James was recently on ‘The View’ to talk about his guest stint on ‘General Hospital’. His interview can be seen below along with his “exit” interview.

Caps will be added shortly! In the mean time, here’s a few stills from ‘The View’ along with some new ‘General Hospital’ stills.

GALLERY LINKS:
- Appearances > 2010 > ABC’s “The View” – Season 13
- Television Series > 2009 | General Hospital > Production Stills
- Television Series > 2009 | General Hospital > Behind The Scenes

James Franco needed a change. After years of travelling fast on the upward curve of an enviable acting career, he decided to go back to university and study poetry. His decision to attend class at Columbia in New York City can be seen as a cry to those who had pigeonholed him as a pretty-boy movie star to look deeper and see that it was his appearances in Milk and In the Valley of Elah were closer in spirit to him than turns in Spider-Man and Date Night.

“It was a need,” he says about school. “After eight years of acting I wasn’t satisfied, I needed something more, and I didn’t want to continue just being an actor. I was very grateful for my career but I think if I’d continued to just do that, I would have quit because that was the only thing that I had.

“My work is one thing and my identity is something else, but when acting is all I had, my identity was inevitably tied to my career. So if my career was not doing well, I inevitably felt bad and I did not like that feeling, so having other interests takes the pressure off acting and now it’s a job I can do and work hard at, but because I have this whole other side to my life, I’m not dependent on acting for my self-worth”

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Here’s a nice article/interview USA today has with James.

Take a lead role in a movie or finish a semester at Columbia University. What would you do?For most people, that decision takes a nanosecond. For James Franco, it was excruciating.

“I’ve turned down a lot of movies just to be in school,” says the actor, who began his academic career with a bachelor’s degree in English at UCLA. “And it felt like, ‘All right, (acting) is still my job. I still need to do this.’ ”

He was just three credits shy of earning his MFA when a two-week overlap between his final semester’s finish line and adventure film 127 Hours‘ start date forced his hand. “I can’t support myself on an academic career, or directing, yet,” he says. “So I took it.”

He sounds pained.

“I’ve done my thesis, I’ve done everything,” he says softly. Because he took the role, Franco lost a semester’s worth of work and will not graduate this year.

Franco, 32, just closed the Tribeca Film Festival with his directorial debut, the documentary Saturday Night. Dressed in a button-down and jeans, with tousled brown curly hair, he does not often look at the interviewer, but he speaks earnestly.

Click here to read the rest.