Truth behind Franco and Hill
Actors no strangers to fame, infamy
NEW YORK
There’s a good kind of fame, the type that dumps money in your bank account, lands you a few Oscar nominations and gets desirable movies on your résumé.
Then there’s the atrocious kind, known as infamy, when you’re known for stuff that makes other people cross the street rather than walk by you.
Such is the character played by James Franco in True Story, in theaters Friday. Christian Longo is in prison, suspected of murdering of his wife and children. He’s smarmy and sly, charming and slippery, evasive and clever. Trying to get to his core is Jonah Hill’s Michael Finkel, who wrote for The New York Times before being busted for making stuff up.
Putting two such icky characters front and center was challenging.
“You want the audience to emotionally engage. You want them to be able to watch it without shutting off by the end,” Franco says. “You need to present the characters so the audience doesn’t write them off.”
Playing a journalist made twotime Oscar nominee Hill ( Money
ball, The Wolf of Wall Street) ap- preciate the nature of being honest, without prevarication.
“I wouldn’t want to spend my time wondering what people are thinking,” Hill says. “You’re just going to look for something bad. It’s like reading reviews of your films. I don’t read anything about myself any longer. I prefer not to.
“When I was younger, I was more interested. It was hard to resist. Now I let it go. There’s nothing you can do, really,” he says, turning to Franco. “Do you?”
Franco, vocal on Instagram and Twitter, shakes his head.
“You can watch anybody who starts to get attention — you can see everybody coming to grips with it. It’s a very powerful draw,” he says. “If people are writing about you, what do they think? Dude, chill out.
“If you’re in the public eye and if people are writing about you, unless you’re a politician and running on issues you need to answer and be clear about, people are going to have their own experience of our movie, our performance, and who we are.
“I don’t read anything about myself anymore. It would drive you crazy. There are times you do want to respond, and it never works out if you defend yourself or fight back. The great thing about Instagram is that you can block people.”
Says Hill: “I love how this interview has turned into ‘ Do we Google ourselves?’ ”
Franco is happy to answer: “I haven’t Googled myself in a year.”