James Franco didn’t take the rocky reviews of his Oscars hosting gig too well — according to actor and comedian Paul Rust , that is, who said he saw Franco lose it on set days after his infamous awards night back in 2011. Rust said on a Dec. 27 podcast episode of his With Gourley and Rust show that he “saw James Franco flip out once,” per Variety .
Rust said that the alleged incident took place in 2011 during promotion for Franco’s film Your Highness , not long after Franco co-hosted the 83rd Academy Awards alongside Anne Hathaway . (Unfortunately for the pair, their hosting work was widely panned, with The Hollywood Reporter brutally writing, “In what could go down as one of the worst Oscar telecasts in history, a bad and risky idea proved out in spectacularly unwatchable fashion.”) Rust said Franco was tapped to do promo for Your Highness with CollegeHumor, “and the idea was that a group of nerds are playing Dungeons and Dragons with the stars of Your Highness , James Franco and Danny McBride ,” while noting that production took place “literally two days” after the Oscars.
“He was upset because the reviews were not good. He was in a bad mood,” Rust alleged, while claiming Franco delivered an “unusable” performance on set while mumbling and keeping his head down. When the director of the promo asked Franco, “What was that? What are you doing?” the actor only became more “upset,” Rust claimed, and went “off-script” during the next tak.
