Viewers didn’t love it in 2011 when James Franco and Anne Hathaway co-hosted the Academy Awards.
But everyman Franco now says he has no regrets.
“When Anne Hathaway decided to host the Oscars with me … she had said no before, and then they asked me to ask her, and I said, ‘Let’s just do it. It’ll be an adventure,’ and then we got a lot of s*** for it,” Franco told New York magazine.
The actor who seems to specialize in just about everything else said he viewed hosting the Oscars much like he did appearing on the TV soap opera “General Hospital,” which he was also doing around the same time.
He ended up on the soap as an experiment, he said, since he was doing an art film in which his character was a soap actor. So naturally Franco reached out to “General Hospital” and ended up doing a guest arc on the show, much to the surprise of fans.
“I wasn’t trying to turn the soap opera into something of my own making. I was in their hands,” Franco said. “When I was asked to do the Oscars, I thought I’ll do the same thing. Nobody expects me to host the Oscars.”
But Franco — who was nominated that year for best actor for “127 Hours” but didn’t win — quickly learned that hosting the annual awards show and Hollywood’s biggest night was not the same as guest starring on a soap.
“Nobody cares if you disrupt a soap opera, but if you go and host the Oscars and they get even an inkling of you trying to subvert it in any way or punk it in any way, people are going to get pissed,” Franco told the publication.