James Franco recently agreed to his first interview in nearly four years, during which he addressed the sexual misconduct allegations leveled against him back in January 2018. In a sitdown with SiriusXM’s Jess Cagle, the actor claimed he is a changed man, and while he didn’t explicitly apologize, he said he’s been “doing a lot of work,” which involves being in recovery from sex addiction since 2016. Franco also continued to dismiss the accusations of sexually exploitive behavior put forth in a 2019 lawsuit from two former students of his now-defunct acting school.
“There were people that were upset with me and I needed to listen,” Franco said, when asked why he has mostly remained silent about the accusations. “When something like this happens, like the natural human instinct is to just make it stop. You just want to get out in front of it and whatever you have to do — apologize, you know, get it done. But what that doesn’t do is allow you to do the work to look at what was underneath.”
He continued, “There’s probably an iceberg underneath that of behavior, of patterning, of just being blind to yourself that isn’t gonna just be solved overnight. So 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 for substance abuse. And there were some issues that I had to deal with that were also related to addiction. And so I’ve really used my recovery background to kind of start examining this and, and changing who I was.”
