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"  James Franco has been reborn, and not a moment too soon. If his slate of films from the last year had been anything like the trio he headlined in 2006\u2014Annapolis, Tristan &amp;amp;amp; Isolde, and Flyboys\u2014he might be dusting off his fox-trot shoes right about now for the next season of Dancing With the Stars rather than basking in the glow of being Hollywood&amp;#039;s latest critical darling. Franco&amp;#039;s early career was bursting with promise\u2014the formerly bucktoothed, perpetually shy kid from Palo Alto, California, found his star turn as rebel stud Daniel Desario on the Judd Apatow\u2013produced, short-lived 1999 NBC series Freaks and Geeks. In 2002, he won a Golden Globe for his performance in a TV movie in which he played another actor with a similar balance of almost inconceivable beauty and a high-toned quest for mastery of his craft: James Dean. (So rare a type is Franco that we almost believed those press reports claiming that what finally drove Lindsay Lohan into rehab in 2007 was his rejection of her advances.) Then he fell into a typical hot-young-thing trap, cool Spider-Man gig notwithstanding: He chose a few bad roles and perhaps suffered from a reputation for being a handful, the guy who always wanted to do 10 takes, two of which, as Apatow recently said, were &amp;quot;the greatest thing you&amp;#039;ve ever seen. And the other eight you&amp;#039;ve got to sit through. You don&amp;#039;t know what&amp;#039;s going to come out. He might lick your face eight times.&amp;quot; Apatow, his discoverer\u2014who, post-Knocked Up, has become Hollywood&amp;#039;s godfather of comedy\u2014lassoed Franco back from the brink, casting him in Pineapple Express opposite Seth Rogen as pot dealer Saul Silver. In Franco&amp;#039;s hands, Saul is a character impossible not to love and it&amp;#039;s a performance, at moments so sweetly vulnerable, that is impossible not to admire. Expect another revelation from Franco&amp;#039;s turn opposite Sean Penn in Milk, director Gus Van Sant&amp;#039;s biopic of slain politician Harvey Milk. Franco portrays Scott Smith, often called &amp;quot;The Widow Milk&amp;quot; for having been the longtime boyfriend of the San Francisco city supervisor, who, as the country&amp;#039;s first prominent openly gay elected official, became an MLK-like martyr for the gay rights movement when he and Mayor George Moscone were gunned down by an aggrieved fellow politician in 1978. (Van Sant reckons that in these post-Brokeback days, there&amp;#039;s no longer a perceived career curse threatening actors who play gay. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t think there&amp;#039;s that same kind of sensational quality about playing gay roles as there was when Jon Voight was in Midnight Cowboy,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Today it&amp;#039;s probably different. Clay Aiken is out.&amp;quot;)  If Franco playing tonsil hockey on-screen with Penn isn&amp;#039;t enough to shock, imagine being a freshman at Columbia University and seeing Franco&amp;#039;s mug en route to your 8 a.m. psych lecture; the 30-year-old, fresh from graduating from UCLA, is enrolled in Columbia&amp;#039;s MFA writing program. (Sorry, early birds, Franco is still with his longtime girlfriend, actress Ahna O&amp;#039;Reilly. But would it have killed you to brush your hair before leaving the dorm?) Just before he was to duck into Absurdistan author Gary Shteyngart&amp;#039;s fiction workshop, ELLE probed Franco on man love, pesky freshman groupies, and how the guy with everything almost lost it all. ELLE: You&amp;#039;re famous for immersing yourself in roles, whether it involves learning to box, training as a sword fighter, or spending the night on the streets to play a homeless character. Just how did you prepare to play Harvey Milk&amp;#039;s boyfriend? JAMES FRANCO: You mean, how did I prepare to kiss Sean Penn? As far as the kissing and intimacy, no, Sean and I did not make out during rehearsals or anything like that. I just knew I had to be relaxed and natural or it was going to be ridiculous. So I guess, when you&amp;#039;re actually kissing, you try not to think about it too much. There was one shot where, I don&amp;#039;t know how long it actually turned out to be in the movie, but the shot took about a minute to film. We had to kiss for a minute, which is a very long time on-screen. ELLE:  A minute? I don&amp;#039;t think I&amp;#039;ve kissed for a full minute since middle school. JF: Exactly, like when you&amp;#039;re playing truth or dare. It&amp;#039;s a really long time. When you do a peck, you don&amp;#039;t really think about it. You do it, and it&amp;#039;s over. But when you&amp;#039;re kissing for a minute, there&amp;#039;s no denying it. After 20 seconds, what went through my head is, I&amp;#039;m kissing Spicoli! Then afterward, you do all those jokes, like, &amp;quot;Oh, yeah, how &amp;#039;bout those Raiders?&amp;quot; ELLE: You and Penn share a surprising amount of affection on-screen. JF : In the original script I read, there was only one real kissing scene. A month after Gus asked me to do it, they sent me another script, and on page five there was a full-on love scene. And I was like, &amp;quot;Gus, what the heck?&amp;quot; He says, &amp;quot;Well, it was Sean&amp;#039;s idea.&amp;quot; Sean figured, he&amp;#039;s doing a gay role, so people are going to be sitting in the movies thinking, When is he going to kiss another guy? They&amp;#039;re just waiting for the sex, so you might as well get it out of the way\u2014boom\u2014and they won&amp;#039;t be thinking about it anymore. ELLE: In Brokeback Mountain, that tent scene left no doubt of who was the top. Here, it&amp;#039;s not made so plain. JF: Scott was certainly the bottom in the relationship. That&amp;#039;s what I was told. People automatically assume the more masculine partner is the top, the problem with that being that Scott was actually kind of masculine. ELLE: Do you fear that there might be career ramifications in playing a gay character so convincingly? JF: I think maybe it works in the opposite direction. I think there are closeted actors out there who, if they came out, it would hurt their chances of getting straight roles, which is a shame. But the reverse\u2014it seems like different times. And if there was some sort of backlash, I&amp;#039;d happily take it on. This is the kind of movie I&amp;#039;d suffer that for.  ELLE: Hmm. Now do you think this might be the best way to identify the straight men in Holly-wood: They&amp;#039;re the only ones willing to play gay roles? JF: No. No. No.  ELLE: Your performance in Pineapple Express was a revelation. After seeing Flyboys, Annapolis, and Tristan &amp;amp;amp; Isolde, who would have guessed you were funny? JF:  Yeah, we don&amp;#039;t have to talk about those movies. ELLE: Well, regardless of their quality, they were serious movies, right? You must have wanted to play the hero.  JF: I wanted to do serious movies. I had a certain idea of what good acting was. That&amp;#039;s since changed, and I love doing comedies now. I don&amp;#039;t like a lot of those movies now, but I thought those were movies that I could do real, serious performances in. I should have known when I was doing Annapolis that this boxing movie wasn&amp;#039;t going to be Raging Bull. ELLE: Back then, whose career did you emulate? JF: My favorite actors from the earlier generation are Brando, Dean, and Clift, and maybe Paul Newman; then you&amp;#039;ve got Pacino, De Niro, Nicholson, Duvall; then there&amp;#039;s Sean Penn; and even younger than that, Benicio Del Toro and Jeffrey Wright.  ELLE: It&amp;#039;s interesting you name all those actors, because when I look at your first leading roles, they look more like early Tom Cruise vehicles.  JF: Exactly. Ugh. It&amp;#039;s so painful. I take the blame for the choices, but I also got advice from people, and certainly one career strategy is to do successful leading man roles so that then you can have more choices and blah, blah, blah. So I wasn&amp;#039;t thinking, I gotta be like Tom, but, sure, part of the philosophy was to be a successful leading man. Seth [Rogen]&amp;#039;s philosophy is that he won&amp;#039;t appear in any movie that he himself wouldn&amp;#039;t go out and see. It seems really simple, but I just didn&amp;#039;t get it. I didn&amp;#039;t want to go out and see Annapolis, and I was in it. ELLE: There was a recent report in Columbia&amp;#039;s school newspaper that you were set upon by a mob of female students. Are you creating the equivalent of a one-man Beatlemania on campus? JF:  It wasn&amp;#039;t really a mobbing. But I&amp;#039;m in the writing program, so I like to write after class at night. And I went to the library because at UCLA I used the library all the time and nobody bothered me at all. So I went into this lounge and sat in a chair in the corner, and I was fine for a little while, but as soon as one person broke the ice and asked for an autograph, that was like permission for everybody who was interested to come up. It was just kind of a lot of people, coming up one after another.  ELLE:  What&amp;#039;s the matter with these girls? Don&amp;#039;t they know that when you come to New York City, you&amp;#039;re supposed to treat everybody with disdain, especially celebrities? JF: They&amp;#039;re freshmen. They&amp;#039;re not locals, and they&amp;#039;re not jaded yet. So I just don&amp;#039;t go to the library anymore.  ELLE:  Judd Apatow has said when he first saw you, he didn&amp;#039;t understand that you were a really handsome man, that he had to be told this by women around him. When did you realize you were a really good-looking guy? JF: I don&amp;#039;t know. The problem with a question like this... ELLE: Should I rephrase it? Okay. When did you start getting a lot of attention from women? JF: In junior high and high school, sure, girls told me I was cute or whatever, but I was so shy I could never really make anything happen or cash in. But through most of high school, I had a girlfriend.  ELLE: Did you ever feast of the buffet of women that was available to you once you became a successful Hollywood actor? JF: &amp;quot;Feast of the buffet&amp;quot;? If you&amp;#039;re trying to phrase these questions better, you&amp;#039;re not succeeding. [Laughs] Actually, for most of my life, I&amp;#039;ve been in long-term relationships. There were a few relationships early on that crashed and burned pretty quickly, but I&amp;#039;ve been in yearlong, two-year-long, three-year-long relationships for a lot of my life. ELLE: You once spoke about meeting a guy\u2014a former roommate of Brad Pitt&amp;#039;s, actually\u2014who told you that he took acting classes to meet women and knew all the good material to seduce a scene partner. What are the best scenes?  JF:  I was in acting class for way too long, at Playhouse West for eight years, and I did not use class as a dating pool, but yeah, if you&amp;#039;re using acting class to meet women, sure, you can figure out which scenes work best. You&amp;#039;d have to be an idiot not to know that that stuff goes on. I heard this one guy used a scene in the play Extremities to hit on a girl. It was particularly distasteful because the scene is this horrible rape attempt. And I remember thinking, He used that? But a scene like that will get physical, which is, I guess, exactly what he was thinking. There&amp;#039;s tons of little romantic scenes in Neil Simon plays; there&amp;#039;s some John Patrick Shanley plays, maybe Italian American Reconciliation. The Red Coat has a sweet little scene. There&amp;#039;s also a group of one-act plays called Lovers and Other Strangers with a lot of love scenes, and one in particular where a guy is trying to get a girl in bed.  ELLE:  Lately you&amp;#039;ve acknowledged that early in your career, your efforts to be a great actor made you difficult to work with. JF: I&amp;#039;ll acknowledge that, yeah. But if I didn&amp;#039;t get along with a director, it was never because I was demanding a bigger trailer or partying too late. It was always coming from a place where I was trying to get the best performance I could, and I thought I knew better than the director. For the record, I&amp;#039;ve completely changed my philosophy now. I only work with people I trust and respect, so if they have a different take on a scene or character, I&amp;#039;m completely willing to try it their way because I trust them. ELLE: Did anybody tell you that being labeled difficult and having issues with directors was hurting your career? JF: Sure, that was an issue. It couldn&amp;#039;t help my career. But more than that, I was not enjoying it. I thought, If this is what acting is and what my experience on set is going to be like every time, I can&amp;#039;t do it and I really don&amp;#039;t want to do it. That&amp;#039;s one of the reasons I went back to school and started to really take a look at how I was conducting myself on set. I had to find a new way. ELLE:  Are you a breeze now? I read that during a fight scene in Pineapple Express you improvised and bit Rosie Perez on the ass. JF: Yes, I did. But that was not being a difficult actor. Rosie wasn&amp;#039;t like, James, you&amp;#039;re such a difficult actor! How could you bite me on the ass? Actually, everybody applauded. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/a9719/the-graduate-264016/>