“If you talk to anyone I know, they will tell you that I ask a million questions but that I rarely talk about myself,” Dave Franco says. “I’m a very curious person. I know everything about myself. So I’m bored. I want to hear about you.”
It’s nice of him to say that. But I don’t think we’re allowed to chat much about me. I am not the cheekily handsome star of Bad Neighbours, Now You See Me and The Studio. I am not the husband of Alison Brie or the brother of James Franco.
As it happens, Dave Franco is not bad at chatting about himself. He is sparky, self-deprecating and full of good stories. He also knows how to talk up this week’s project. He is currently promoting his voice role as Titus, the insect king, in Pixar’s amusing animation Hoppers.
The premise has a plucky young woman transfer her consciousness into that of a robot beaver by way of saving a local habitat from environmental annihilation. As so often with Pixar films, grown-up themes are wound in with the zaniness.
“It’s classic Pixar, where they have these messages in their films that feel very potent but they don’t cram them down your throat,” he says. “They approach it in a very nuanced, creative way. They present everything, and then you can take what you want from it. But it’s also this beautiful story about these two different sides of that issue. There is this message about stepping into someone else’s shoes, even if you hate that person.”
You get the sense that Franco could jaw on all night. Chiselled of feature, dark of aspect, he bears traces of a classic American melting pot: Portuguese, Swedish and Russian Jewish ancestry. It says here that he and James, a busy Hollywood polymath, were raised by mum, a children’s author, and, dad, a businessman, in Palo Alto, California. That’s Silicon Valley. Right? All juice bars and tech billionaires?
“It was a much different place when I was growing up there,” he says. “It was beautiful. It was in the middle of nature. There were a lot of mom-and-pop stores. It felt understated and kind of low key in a way. But then, over the years, it became the centre of Silicon Valley. And northern California is basically all tech now, in a similar way that LA is all entertainment.”
By the time Dave left school, James, who’s about seven years older, had courted cult success in the TV show Freaks and Geeks and rubbed against proper stardom as Harry Osborne in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man.
The younger Franco initially studied creative writing at the University of Southern California, but he dropped out when, shortly before graduation, he secured a decent role in an independent picture.
“I remember telling my teachers, ‘Please, let me finish this final month from afar,’” he says. “I’m just a month away. And they said, ‘I’m sorry, you have to be here in person.’ So that made me drop out of USC to shoot in Winnipeg.”
He laughs as he describes a “physically demanding” shoot that led to him dislocating a shoulder. But he was enjoying the experience until he wasn’t.
“We then find out that they had no money left,” he says, laughing. “They hadn’t been paying the crew for weeks. They send us all home. We’re waiting for the call for them to say, ‘We spent millions of dollars on this movie. Let’s come back and finish these final two weeks.’ But we never went back.”
He filed it all under Experience.
“They eventually finished the final pieces of the movie with an entirely different cast,” he says. “I don’t know how they did it, but they put the movie together. So it’s out there. It’s living in the world. The worst movie you will ever see. Ha ha!”
No enormous breakthrough occurred. Franco, rather, worked his way slowly up the ladder to become a reliable – and undeniably handsome – leading man. He was great in 21 Jump Street. He had fun in the conjuring heist Now You See Me. Franco acknowledges the assistance of his brother in the early stages.
“It was so helpful on so many levels, just to have someone who had gone through it,” he says. “I could ask him any question and likely he had already experienced whatever I’m asking him about. He helped me get my first manager, which is not a small thing. That is not something I take for granted.”
The Studio: Seth Rogen, Dave Franco and Ike Barinholtz. Photograph: Apple TV
Even before meeting him, you feel fairly confident that the version of “Dave Franco” he plays in The Studio, Seth Rogen’s popular Hollywood satire on Apple TV, isn’t a mere variation on the real thing. Esquire described the character “a hard-partying, high-rolling troublemaker”. One can certainly imagine real-life models for such a loudmouth, but the amiable Franco, married to Alison Brie – clever star of Mad Men and Community – for the past nine years, does not sound like one of them.
“I appreciate you saying that,” he says, smiling. “I’m a pretty low-key person these days. I do not have a drug habit. My idea of an exciting night these days is going to a 5pm dinner with my wife, coming home, getting in bed and watching a documentary and being asleep by 9.30pm.
“So ‘Dave Franco’ in The Studio is going to Vegas, and he’s taking a cocktail of alcohol, weed, mushrooms and cocaine. That was a big departure for me, even though I technically am playing myself.
“But it was so fun. In a similar way to this character in Hoppers, I get to just be totally unhinged, bring my energy up to an ‘11’ and just have the time of my life.”
So how accurate is The Studio about Hollywood? Are the executives so vacuous and venal? Is everyone so conscious about watching their own back?
“There are certain things in the show that I think people might think are farce that are actually very true,” he says. “Some people in the industry have told me that they actually have difficulty watching the show because it stresses them out too much. It’s a little too close to home. But I don’t know. I feel very lucky along my journey in this business, as I’ve been surrounded by really good people who have taken care of me.”
Dave Franco and Alison Brie. Photograph: Hubert Vestil/SXSW Conference & Festivals/Getty
One of those people is now Brie. They married in 2017 but have been dating since as long ago as 2012. That counts as an eternity in Hollywood. I sense no reticence from Franco in rabbiting about his life and career, but he did seem to be having a better time when he and Brie were promoting their recent horror film Together. There was a lot of amiable banter between them.
“This whole experience is a lot easier when you have someone to bounce off of – especially my wife, who obviously is the person I’m closest to in this world, the person I love more than anyone in this world,” he says. “But she happens to also be a very outgoing, gregarious, funny person, and so, when I’m doing these press junkets with her, it ends up being a good time. We could just be silly together and lean on each other.”
Franco looks to have struck a neat balance in his career. He emerged through comedy, but he has also found strong supporting roles in acclaimed dramas such as If Beale Street Could Talk and Love Lies Bleeding. The very fact that he was cast in The Studio confirms his presence in the Hollywood dramatis personae. People know who he is and what he does. One of the things he does now is direct. The Rental, his 2020 horror, went down well with the critics.
“My first ever job was at a tiny video store,” he tells me. “I was 14 at the time, and it was actually illegal for me to be working there at that age. So they basically paid me by allowing me to take home as many movies as I wanted. And so that was kind of my film school.”
The experience of directing made him appreciate the different pressures of the performing art.
“The greatest experiences I have had have been directing,” he says. “They have been such fulfilling times in my life. But you put so much of yourself into it. So it’s actually amazing now to step on set just as an actor. ‘Oh, I just have one job. I’m going to kill this for you. Let’s go!’ Ha ha!”
Hoppers is in cinemas from Friday, March 6th