

Already knee-deep into one of the most eclectic careers in entertainment history, James Franco takes another artistic plunge today with the release of his first novel, Actors Anonymous, out from New Harvest. (You thought he'd already written a novel, right? Well, he's also not yet launched an interpretive Butoh dance troupe, but give it time.) The Anonymous storyline follows the struggles of aspiring actors in Hollywood through a series of vignettes, which are tied together by the narrator’s seemingly first-hand knowledge of the industry and celebrity culture in general. Although the narrator identifies himself clearly as “James Franco,” Franco himself—the filmmaker, writer, Oscar-nominated actor, Gucci model, and current PhD candidate in English at Yale—tells us not to make any assumptions. Below, highlights from our conversation with the new novelist, who spoke to us during a break in directing his film adaptation of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, near Jackson, Mississippi.

by Chris Weeks/Getty Images.

VF Daily: Congratulations on publishing your first novel. What moved you to start writing fiction?

James Franco: I’ve been interested in literature for a very long time. I got into it back in high school [in Palo Alto, California], when I got into a lot of trouble. I needed to figure out a way to do things differently, so for a while I stopped hanging out with the people I had been hanging out with and found myself alone a lot. That was when I picked up literature. Then, when I went away to college at U.C.L.A., acting kind of took off before my other interests. I acted professionally for about eight years, and I was writing all that time but never showed anybody any of it. There just came a point after those eight years when I thought, “There’s a lot I can do with acting—there are a lot of things I can express and do creatively, but there are also limitations.” And at that point I decided to take my interest in literature as seriously as my acting, so I went back to school and then graduate school.

What authors did you read while you were in high school?

A big influence of mine in high school was William Faulkner. I’ve made a film adaptation of As I Lay Dying, which premiered at Cannes this year. At the moment, I’m in Mississippi working on another Faulkner adaptation, The Sound and the Fury. Other authors I read a lot in high school were Melville, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Burroughs, and Kerouac.

Your own book follows an unusual format: you call it a novel, but to me it’s impossible not to read elements of autobiography in there. Was that intentional?

It’s still fiction, but it’s about the search for reality. When I started writing after my career as an actor, I knew that that other life in the film industry would be pulled into my writing life and that people would see me not as an author but as an actor starting to write. In my first book [Palo Alto, a collection of short stories published by Scribner in 2010], there was a part of me that wanted to keep the two worlds separate. But not this time.

What changed with this new project?

I now have 17-plus years of experience as a professional actor and in the film world. That is something I can draw on. Those are life experiences that not everybody has. Why am I trying to hide from that? It’s not like my book is a memoir by any means, but it’s just me embracing what I have that is fairly unique about my life.

The title of the book is Actors Anonymous—why did you decide to draw a parallel between a psychological disorder like alcoholism and a career in acting?

The connection I’m making is not that acting is an addiction or something to recover from. It’s more that life is hard, life is traumatic, and these programs have participants look at deeper issues that are underlying addictions, which is something we should all be doing, including actors. I guess what I was trying to get at was the question of how we engage with each other and with life, and what personas we create to go out into the world.

The book is interspersed with chapters that seem to contain your own direct musings on Hollywood. Should readers interpret these insights as your own or a fictional “James’s”?

No, if I’d wanted to write a book about my feelings on Hollywood, I would have just written a memoir. But that’s not what this is. So no, I consider those sections as an unconventional parallel narrative, woven into the rest of the novel. It’s more like a backbone to the rest of the chapters. There are short stories in the book that involve characters who are newer to Hollywood, and you could say that the sections with the statements are from a voice that’s been in Hollywood for awhile.

So the chapters are in conversation with one another?

Yes, they definitely respond to each other. This book poses as a recovery book, containing stories of experience and people who are lost, and then there are sections that speak with more authority—the voices of people who have been through all the same shit before and are relating how to deal with these things.



You’re most famous as an actor, so if I may: of all the characters you’ve played—including yourself, in This Is the End—do you have a favorite role to play?

My favorite role ever was Alien in Spring Breakers. It’s not that I want to go that over-the-top in every movie, but [director] Harmony [Korine] created an atmosphere in that movie where a character like that fits and works. As an actor, you can feel a huge sense of relief and creative freedom when a director makes a movie such that there are no parameters, and you can just go wild.
