Actor James Franco is confessing that he did sleep with students at his acting school in a new tell-all interview.
Over the past few years, Franco has faced several misconduct allegations that he finally addressed during an interview on SiriusXM’s “The Jess Cagle Podcast.” Not only did he admit to sleeping with students, but he also admitted that he has been battling a sex addiction since 2016.
James Franco Discusses Struggles With Substance Abuse And Addiction
Franco revealed that after the allegations made headlines in 2018, he decided “I’m gonna be quiet. I’m gonna be, I’m gonna pause. Did not seem like the right time to say anything. There were people that were upset with me and I needed to listen.”
He added, “I’ve just been doing a lot of work. And I guess I’m pretty confident in saying like, four years, you know? And, I was in recovery before, you know, for substance abuse. And, there were some issues that I had to deal with that were also related to addiction. And so I’ve, I’ve really used my, my recovery background to kind of start examining this and, and changing who I was.”
Franco referred to sex as a “powerful drug” and admitted to being in recovery since 2016.
“I got hooked on it for 20 more years,” he continued. “And the insidious part of that is that I stayed sober from alcohol all that time. So, and I went to meetings, you know, all that time. I even tried to, you know, sponsor other people. And so in my head, it was like, ‘oh, I’m sober. I’m living a spiritual life.’ Where on the side, I’m acting out now in all these other ways. And I couldn’t see it.”
Franco explained that he used to justify his addiction by saying that it was “fine” because it was “between two consenting adults.”
“I took that and I ran with it and used it as an excuse to, you know, just hook up all over the place,” he said.
“I [was] completely blind to power dynamics or anything like that, but also completely blind to people’s feelings,” he continued. “I didn’t wanna hurt people. And I, in fact, I wasn’t like really a one-night-stand guy. Like people that I, you know, got together with or dated, like I’d see them for a long time, years. It’s just that I couldn’t be present for any of them. And the behavior spun out to a point where it was like I was hurting everybody.”
James Franco Slept With Students At His Acting School
Franco admitted that calling one of the classes at his acting school “Sex Scenes” was “one of the stupidest things I did.” He explained that the class itself was not about sex scenes, but he was just using the provocative title to attract students – something that is referenced in the Sandra Oh Netflix comedy, “The Chair.”
“It was a class where they did scenes about whatever their romance is, you know, what they go through as young people,” he explained. “So meeting people on, you know, dating apps or breakups, or, you know, just a bad date, stuff like that. That’s what was being done in that class. It was not sex scenes.”
Franco then dropped a bombshell when he admitted, “Look, I’ll admit I did sleep with students.”
“I didn’t sleep with anybody in that particular class,” he added, “But, over the course of my teaching, I did sleep with students and that was wrong. But like I said, I, it’s not why I started the school and I, I didn’t, I wasn’t the person that selected the people to be in the class. So it wasn’t a master plan on my part. But yes, there were certain instances where, you know what I was in a consensual thing with, with a student and I shouldn’t have been.”
