Dave Franco, Actually Romantic

It’s almost a shock to see Dave Franco doing press without his wife, Alison Brie, by his side. The pair were basically joined at the hip earlier this year while promoting their body horror movie Together, in which they play a married couple actually joined at the hip, and flooding the internet with marital dispatches both sweet (their Mardi Gras meet-cute) and TMI (they had to pee together). But even though Franco’s flying solo during our lunch at a Beverly Hills hotel, Brie — and stories about being perhaps a little too close together — still come up.

“In my childhood home, my mom hadn’t touched my room since I left when I was 18, and that included my twin bed,” Franco recalls as we make small talk about the woes of visiting in-laws. “Every time Alison and I would go visit my mom, we would be squished in that twin bed. And it got to the point where she said, ‘Babe, I love you. I love your mom. I love your hometown. I can’t do that anymore.’”

They eventually got a little more space when they bought a bigger bed for his old room, and now Franco has a bit more distance from his better half because, with his new movie, Regretting You, “I got another Allison with me.” Based on the novel by It Ends With Us author Colleen Hoover, Regretting You stars Allison Williams and Franco as Morgan and Jonah, longtime friends and near siblings-in-law — Morgan’s sister is Jonah’s partner — whose lives are upended when their significant others die in a car crash. That’s tragic enough, but the real knife twist comes when they learn that the deceased were having an affair, and Morgan and Jonah start to confront their own lingering feelings that perhaps it was the two of them who should have been together in the first place.

Franco is not much of a romance novel guy in his spare time (“I read nerdy film books”), but the swoony stuff admittedly comes pretty naturally. “In real life I am very romantic. If you ask my wife, she would say I’m much more romantic than she is,” he says. “I also am a pretty sensitive, vulnerable, open guy.”

“My idea of an exciting night is staying in with my wife and my cats and watching a documentary and being asleep by 10 p.m.”

If seeing Franco, beloved for youthful comedies like 21 Jump Street and Neighbors, deal with grown-up, quasi-middle-aged problems on screen might cause millennials everywhere to wonder where the years have gone, just know Franco’s right there with you. Even at 40, he’s still got a youthful energy and baby face that let an American Eagle polo do the heavy lifting during Regretting You’s flashback scenes to Jonah’s 2007 high school graduation. (There is some digital de-aging, but it’s “subtle and tasteful,” he says a bit bashfully.) Franco does, however, recall a moment on set when 19-year-old Mckenna Grace, who plays Williams’ grieving teenage daughter, learned that her on-screen uncle, Scott Eastwood, was the guy from Taylor Swift’s “Wildest Dreams” music video. This video had been extremely important to her when she was a little kid — you know, a decade ago — and Grace excitedly called her mom from the set to break the news while Franco, Williams, and Eastwood quietly took stock of the inexorable march of time. Moments like that “do make me acknowledge my age and where I’m at, but in a good way,” Franco says.

He had another one of those moments while filming his scene-stealing turn in The Studio as an extremely exaggerated version of himself, blitzed on at least four different drugs at a Vegas party. “I barely drink these days. I definitely don’t go to Vegas. I can’t remember the last time I did any kind of drug. My idea of an exciting night these days is staying in with my wife and my cats and watching a documentary and being asleep by 10 p.m.,” Franco says, reaching new levels of relatability. Sometimes, when party-ready pedestrians come up to him on the street, they’re almost disappointed: “[They’re like] ‘Oh. It’s acting,’” he says, shaking his head. “And I’d be like, ‘You got me, man. You figured me out.’” Maybe, Franco admits, he was a little more like that way back whenhe was a student at the USC. But even then, The Studio Dave is a cartoon version of himself.

“The kernel of the real me in that character is the fact that I generally am pretty positive and optimistic,” Franco says. The Studio creators Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg — who have known Franco since before his film debut in Superbad — took that to a new level of toxic positivity. “No matter how dire the circumstances were, I would remain positive — which pissed everyone else off in the scene.”

“I’ve been really lucky to work with some of the best actors of this next generation. If they ever need anything from me, I will do anything for them.”

Perhaps it’s ironic, then, that despite playing himself in The Studio, Franco considers his Regretting You lead to be closer to who he really is than anybody he’s ever played before. And despite a fruitful, almost two-decade-long career at this point, it feels like audiences are getting to know him better than they ever have. At the start of our lunch, as I list out everything he’s got coming out this year, Franco’s truly surprised to learn he’s had four movies this year (the drama Bubble & Squeak premiered at Sundance, and Now You See Me: Now You Don’t hits theaters Nov. 14). Add to that The Studio, plus voice roles in two animated series, and you can see why it might be hard for him to keep track of everything. He’s a prolific actor working in a lot of different genres. The days of being tickled that “Hey, James Franco’s younger brother is acting, too! Neat! I love Scrubs!” are long past.

Franco isn’t the sort to fully reject nepo-sibling accusations, as James helped get him an agent and a foot in the door. However, “no one was going to hire me just because I was James Franco’s little brother,” he says. “If I sucked, I would’ve disappeared very quickly.”

Obviously, he didn’t disappear. Franco can’t recall a specific moment when he stepped out of his eldest brother’s shadow — did you know there are three? — but if a certain viral tweet is any indication, it was at least a couple of years ago, and in any event, James is thrilled for him. “At this point, I think he’s excited just to see me trying new things and to see me grow,” he says

Franco will next appear in Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, which comes nearly a decade after 2016’s Now You See Me 2 and finally makes good on the joke potential of the title. (“If we do a fifth one, we could do Now You Cinco Me and set it in Latin America,” Franco jokes.) These films, which force Franco to learn new card-throwing tricks and reunite him with Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Isla Fisher, and Mark Ruffalo, are among the most fun he has had on a set — though he takes the card-slinging very seriously.

“I don’t want to just recycle the same tricks over and over in every film,” Franco says, lighting up with the particular joy of a grown man finally allowed to talk about his hobby. “And so with this new one, as silly as it sounds, I tried to find new ways to throw cards. I practiced for hours and weeks and months to find different ways to be able to fling cards at you. So now I can do it behind my back and under my legs.”

Even in Now You See Me, a kinetic and knowingly silly popcorn franchise, Franco’s growing up. His character, card shark pickpocket Jack Wilder, was the rookie member of the magical thief supergroup, the youngest and least famous. Now, on and off screen, he’s playing mentor to a cast of younger magicians played by Justice Smith, Dominic Sessa, and Ariana Greenblatt. “I’ve been really lucky to work with some of the best actors of this next generation,” Franco says, including Regretting You’s Mckenna Grace and Mason Thames as well as Kiernan Shipka and Chase Sui Wonders in the bunch. “I want them all to know if they ever need anything from me, I will do anything for them. I feel this strong kinship towards them, and I just want them to have the best careers that they can have and to be able to navigate it in the smoothest way.”

“In real life I am very romantic. If you ask my wife, she would say I’m much more romantic than she is.”

He and Thames are actually about to team up again in a boisterous road trip comedy called The Sh*theads (co-starring Shipka, O’Shea Jackson Jr., and Peter Dinklage). “It was really fun for both of us to play these sweet earnest guys in Regretting You and then to immediately play complete psycho pieces of sh*t in The Sh*theads,” Franco says, neatly summing up his range as an actor. (As for the title: “We’re going to have to fight to keep that name, it’s so good,” Franco adds. “It’s going to be a battle, but it’s one worth fighting.”)

The possibilities for what he’ll explore next are wide open. He says he’s writing an erotic thriller, but he’s not sure he’s quite ready to devote years of his life to directing it just yet. And, perhaps surprisingly, Franco's never been the star of a rom-com, something he feels he should be going after in the near future.

And, if you’re wondering? Of course he’d be open to leading a rom-com opposite Alison Brie. For as much as Franco has fully come into his own as an actor, he does, famously, have a famous spouse. If anything, these days Franco is probably more associated with his wife than with his older brother — which doesn’t bother him in the slightest.

"If the downside of working with my wife is that people are saying, ‘Oh, that’s just Alison Brie's husband,’ that’s fine,” he says. “It’s worth it.”