James Franco on how his hard work to be more than just a Hollywood heartthrob has truly paid off

The Oscar-nominated actor, who’s also written a short story collection and directed and produced several films, can next be seen on the big screen as a bad boy tech billionaire in Why Him? opposite Bryan Cranston

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James Franco (left), Zoey Deutch, Bryan Cranston, Megan Mullally and Griffin Gluck in Why Him?

Published: 8:00am, 30 Dec 2016Updated: 6:37pm, 4 Jan 2017

James Franco likes to go where no other creative type has gone before. Sure he’s a Hollywood star and at 38 remains a heartthrob, yet he’s also prepared to cross every boundary, bend all the genders, play nasty and look downright ugly as he takes on his pantheon of eccentrics.

When it comes to acting, Franco says the old formula of one for me, one for them, doesn’t quite work, because he does enjoy making studio movies, which include his stoner comedies with Seth Rogen like Pineapple Express , This Is the End and The Interview, in which the pair controversially played two very silly American journalists enlisted by the CIA to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

“For me the Hollywood comedies are as important as the movies I direct, like In Dubious Battle,” he says of his recent John Steinbeck adaptation about a fruit pickers’ strike in the 1930s. “I have high hopes for my new studio comedy Why Him?”

Ever since he played Alien, a grille-toothed and heavily tattooed rapper/drug dealer in Harmony Korine’s 2012 indie hit, Spring Breakers , Franco has been riffing on the character. Now in Why Him?, he becomes an adversary of the most popular drug dealer of them all, Walter White – er, I mean Bryan Cranston from Breaking Bad .

Again covered in tattoos, Franco’s Laird Mayhew, despite looking like a drug dealer, is actually a Silicon Valley billionaire who has made his money from creating video games. He’s from a hip new order and for Cranston’s fuddy-duddy Ned Fleming, he’s a little horrifying: Laird is dating his daughter Stephanie (Zoey Deutch).

Franco (right) says he and Cranston became fast friends.

After first glimpsing a naked Laird while talking to his daughter on Skype, Ned grudgingly agrees to spend the holidays with his family at Laird’s lavish Palo Alto estate. When Laird announces that he plans to propose to Stephanie, Ned has five days to stop him.