James Franco Addresses His Working Relationship With Seth Rogen

James Franco is speaking out about his lack of a relationship with longtime collaborator Seth Rogen. In an interview on SiriusXM’s The Jess Cagle Podcast Wednesday, Franco said he still had love for his former Pineapple Express and The Interview partner, despite public statements Rogen made distancing himself from Franco following 2018 allegations that the Spider-Man actor had been sexually inappropriate with multiple women, including students at his former acting school. 

“He was asked about me, and I just wanna say I absolutely love Seth Rogen. … I love Seth Rogen,” Franco told Cagle. “I worked with him for 20 years. We didn’t have one fight for 20 years. Not one fight. He was my absolute closest work friend, collaborator. We just gelled.”

“What he said is true, you know, we aren’t working together right now and we don’t have any plans to work together,” he continued. “Of course, it was hurtful, in context, but I get it. He had to answer for me ’cause I was silent. He had to answer for me, and I don’t want that. So that’s why, that’s one of the main reasons I wanted to talk to you today: I don’t want Seth or my brother or anyone to have to answer for me anymore.”

In May, Rogen told The Sunday Times he had no plans to work with Franco in the future. “What I can say is that I despise abuse and harassment and I would never cover or conceal the actions of someone doing it, or knowingly put someone in a situation where they were around someone like that,” he said, “The truth is that I have not and I do not plan to [work with Franco] right now.” The Knocked Up star added that the allegations “changed many things in our relationship and our dynamic.”

Franco also shared during Wednesday’s interview that he had been in treatment for sex addiction now for years. “In 2018, there were some complaints about me and an article about me and, at that moment I just thought ‘I’m gonna be quiet. I’m gonna be, I’m gonna pause.’ Did not seem like the right time to say anything,” he recalled. “There were people that were upset with me and I needed to listen. There’s a writer Damon Young and he talked about when something like this happens, 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, and to look at what was underneath.”