Not impressed when James Franco co-hosted the Academy Awards?
Neither was he. In the new issue of Playboy, the 33-year-old actor admits he was none too pleased with how he came across on stage.
When Franco was initially asked to co-host the show alongside Anne Hathaway, he asked himself, "How am I going to get out of this?"
"I mean, what are the host's responsibilities?" he wondered. "You have an opening monologue, maybe a bit or two in the middle of the show, and then the rest is just reading names… They told me they knew I wasn't Chris Rock and that they had designed the show around me."
So where did things go wrong? The 127 Hours star blames a lack of material. "In the last week, when we really started focusing on the script for the live show and did a run-through, I said to the producer, 'I don't know why you hired me, because you haven't given me anything,'" he recalls. "I just don't think this stuff's going to be good."
Franco says he was purposefully "low energy" as a contrast to Hathaway's enthusiasm. "I thought I would be the straight man and she could be the other, and that's how I was trying to do those lines," he says. "I felt kind of trapped in that material. I felt [that] this is not my boat. I'm just a passenger, but I'm going down and there’s no way out."
