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Canwest News Service
"I need you," James Franco whispers to a mystery woman on the phone.
"Should I wear anything special, or nothing at all?" she asks.
Franco slams his phone shut. As it turns out, he needs her not for anything sexual, but rather for a hot and steamy shave with a sharp, straight-edged razor blade.
"Was it good for you?" the woman asks him afterward, rubbing something shiny and viscous all over his face.
This was just one of the awesomely melodramatic scenes in Friday afternoon's episode of General Hospital, the ABC soap opera on which movie star Franco ( Pineapple Express, Freaks and Geeks, Spider-Man) is making a series of appearances in a bizarre and much-gossiped-about career move.
In Franco's debut episode, his character — also named Franco — is introduced as an elusive and possibly Parisian performance artist whose "canvas is murder." Audiences first meet him lurking on a dark street, spray-painting a pole immediately after a massive gunfight has taken place.
Jason and Sonny, mobsters, approach the hooded figure to find out what he saw, and we get Franco's first words on camera: "Spare some change?"
One of the men tosses a coin to the ground, and Franco picks it up before disappearing into the shadows, glancing back briefly then flipping the coin into the air and catching it in his fingerless-gloved palm.
"Want me to get rid of him?" Jason asks.
"Nah," Sonny says. "He's harmless."
But we all know he's not, of course, and this is later demonstrated when a victim of the shoot-out calls out to Franco for help; his reaction is to approach the man and– wait for it — stomp on his throat before rearranging his limbs. He then returns to his apartment in the fictional town of Port Charles, glances at a topless man gagged and bound to a chair and places the aforementioned booty call (or rather, shave call).
It's completely ridiculous, but then what soap opera isn't? Franco turns in a solid performance and makes the most of his silly dialogue, not to mention the countless pauses wherein his character must stare into the distance as Adam Lambert's version of Mad World plays solemnly in the background.
Although it's been reported that the actor chose to take on this gig as a kind of performance art — which supposedly ties into a side project with artist John Carter, who made the 2008 film Erased James Franco –it's not an entirely surprising move: Among his other idiosyncratic exploits, Franco has tried to maintain his Hollywood career while working on two different graduate degrees in New York, and he recently signed a deal with Simon & Schuster to produce a collection of short stories.
It will be interesting to see just how twisted and bizarre his General Hospital stint becomes over the next few episodes — and whether Franco can deliver all his outrageous lines without ever cracking an I-can't-believe-I'm-doing-this smile. – James Franco's stint on General Hospital continues for the next two months. Check local listings for air times.
vfarquharson@nationalpost.com
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Jason and Sonny are not the mobsters who Franco asks for change from. They aren’t even in that scene. That’s a pretty major error in this article. I’ve only been watching this show for a week (for Franco) and I know that.
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