Despite the fact that he delivers a soliloquy about his love of the poets Anthony Hecht, Frank Bidart and Spencer Reece, it’s clear Franco is very much a guy’s guy.
He likes sports, and took up boxing and horseback riding for films. He’s even trained in horseback-riding stunts, and can stand on a horse’s back while it’s galloping. “I would dismount and swing back on so I was backwards, I guess in case I ever needed to shoot somebody that was behind me or something, or do Cirque du Soleil,” he says, laughing.
As you’d expect from one of People’s 2008 “sexiest man alive” runners-up, he’s been romantically linked to hot actresses like Marla Sokoloff and Ahna O’Reilly. Sometimes, he answers to the name Ted (his middle name is Edward). His messy crop of brown waves looks like it rarely sees the better end of a brush, and a full-blown 5 o’clock shadow plays along his jawline and up and around his mouth.
This guy could grow a beard in less than 48 hours, I think.
In his new Gucci ads, Franco is fresh-faced—the drenched and slick-haired embodiment of the Italian fashion house’s Gucci by Gucci Sport Pour Homme, which launches this month.
Franco has been the face of Gucci by Gucci Homme fragrance since 2008, and the Gucci Sport campaign is his second foray for the iconic label that Guccio Gucci started as a leather-goods company in Florence in 1921.
The discrepancy between the sleek, sun-lit, larger-than-life ad displayed on the wall and the brooding, black-clad, gruff and multi-dimensional character before me—voted Best Smile in his senior year at Palo Alto High School, I might add—is what attracted Frida Giannini, Gucci’s creative director. As well as being a successful actor, Franco is an academic and an artist, projecting both masculinity and sensitivity. “I’ve always felt looking at him that there is something more going on behind those dark-brown eyes—that mystery and his depth of character are both very appealing,” says Giannini.
With its complex mix of contrasting notes (tart grapefruit and soft mandarin; spicy, warm, powerful cardamom; fruity and green Corsican fig nectar; Gucci’s signature note, rich and woody patchouli), a renaissance man such as Franco was the ideal—no, the only—choice to characterize this unique fragrance.
It all adds yet another dimension to the intriguing and unanswerable question: Who is James Franco? And will the real James Franco please stand up?
First published in FASHION Magazine May 2010
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