NEW YORK � James Franco is fast-flying high.
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In June, he graduated from UCLA with an English degree. On Wednesday, he's prima in comedy king Judd Apatow's up-to-the-minute romp, the stoner "bromance" action comedy Pineapple Express, with Franco's dense pot dealer Saul going on the head for the hills with his equally slow customer Dale (Seth Rogen). And in November, he romances Sean Penn in Gus Van Sant's Milk, a biopic of San Francisco's first openly gay elected official.
"Who would stimulate thought I'd play a Spicoli-like character and and then make forbidden with Spicoli in the same year?" wonders Franco, 30, referring to Penn's infamous pothead surfer from 1982's Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
Milk producer Bruce Cohen, for starters: "It couldn't be a better showcase for his talent to seem at these two roles. They're both different sides of him.
"He's had a lot of life see," Cohen says. "He can bring the attributes of the young stoner guy he needs for Pineapple, but underneath that is the scholar and the deep mind and the guy wHO wants to learn about art and is concerned in politics. His performances are coordination compound and layered."
And this year, they are getting major notice. Franco has been kicking around Hollywood since the late '90s, when Apatow's passing but critically adored TV dramedy Freaks and Geeks put him on the map and set many teen black Maria aflutter. Since then, he won a Golden Globe for his 2001 depiction of James Dean in TNT's TV biopic and alternately befriended and battled Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker in the behemoth Spider-Man trilogy.
His life history has been a interracial bag of the artsy, the big-budget and the plain forgettable. So it's somehow trying on that Franco is back in the spotlight in tandem with Pineapple producer Apatow, world Health Organization first spotty Franco's light side on Freaks, and Freaks co-star Rogen, wHO realized that the deuce had sizzling chemistry.
Apatow calls Franco "a very smart, sweet person. He seems to have really evolved over the last 10 years into this truly easygoing, approachable, warm human beings. When we did Freaks and Geeks, he was so thirsty and taken up with the work. It made him a small more of an intense guy. Now, he's identical happy in his life."
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