Soap opera as performance art

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, actor James Franco explains what he’s doing on General Hospital.

I have been obsessed with performance art for over a decade-ever since the Mexican performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena came to visit my class at Cal Arts summer school. I finally took the plunge and experimented with the form myself when I signed on to appear on 20 episodes of “General Hospital” as the bad-boy artist “Franco, just Franco.” I disrupted the audience’s suspension of disbelief, because no matter how far I got into the character, I was going to be perceived as something that doesn’t belong to the incredibly stylized world of soap operas. Everyone watching would see an actor they recognized, a real person in a made-up world.

I’ve always liked Franco…he plays potheads but seems to have larger ambitions for himself:

James Franco is an actor who appeared in “Milk” and the “Spiderman” movies. He is currently enrolled in NYU’s MFA filmmaking program and Columbia’s MFA program for fiction writing.

(via sippey)

• James Franco