James Franco 11-22-63 promo pic
James Franco is still trying to be taken seriously as an actor. The disgraced former wunderkind who started out as a teen movie idol – and a stoner idol along with buddy Seth Rogen – and who later began directing movies based on serious literature while pursuing a Ph.D. in English at Yale University, is set to play Fidel Castro in a movie about the communist Cuban dictator. Yes – that Fidel Castro.
Plenty of people are laughing at this casting choice for a number of reasons. The least of which is that he does not look the part at all. The actors who won Oscars – or were just nominated 0 for playing real life figures always did. Think or George C, Scott who played Patton, Ben Kingsley who Played Gandhi and Rami Malek who played the rock star Freddie Mercury.
But one person doesn’t think so – none other than Fidel Castro’s own daughter, Alina Fernández. She said that she actually thinks James Franco is right for the part, telling Deadline, “James Franco has an obvious physical resemblance with Fidel Castro, besides his skills and charisma.”
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But another reason for people not liking the casting of James Franco is also why he hasn’t been seen on camera since 2019. He was forced out of movie making for a while after he too was charged in the #MeToo movement. A number of women alleged that the actor had used his acting school as nothing more than a tool for taking advantage of them.
So James Franco was sent into Hollywood exile.
James Franco kind of sort of made a confession of sorts at the end of last year in an interview. He admitted to sleeping with students at the school saying, “Look, I’ll admit I did sleep with students. I didn’t sleep with anybody in [my ‘Sex Scenes’ class], but, over the course of my teaching, I did sleep with students and that was wrong.”
“In 2018, there were some complaints about me and an article about me and, at that moment I just thought ‘I’m gonna be quiet. I’m gonna be, I’m gonna pause.’ Did not seem like the right time to say anything,” Franco said as he remembered how it all unfolded. “There were people that were upset with me and I needed to listen. There’s a writer Damon Young and he talked about when something like this happens, the natural human instinct is to just make it stop. You just want to get out in front of it and whatever you have to do apologize, you know, get it done. But what that doesn’t do is allow you to do the work to, and to look at what was underneath.”
