James Franco and Seth Rogen’s friendship is not what it used to be.
“I haven’t talked to Seth,” Franco, 46, told Variety in an interview published Friday, October 25. “I love Seth, we had 20 great years together, but I guess it’s over. And not for lack of trying. I’ve told him how much he’s meant to me.”
Rogen, 42, and Franco first met on the 1999 teen dramedy Freaks and Geeks before finding success together on the big screen with films like Pineapple Express, This Is the End and The Disaster Artist.
In 2018, however, Franco was accused of sexually inappropriate behavior by five women, four of whom were his acting students. Two of those former students filed a sexual misconduct lawsuit in 2019. Franco settled the lawsuit in 2021.
“While Defendants continue to deny the allegations in the Complaint, they acknowledge that Plaintiffs have raised important issues,” both parties said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter at the time, “and all parties strongly believe that now is a critical time to focus on addressing the mistreatment of women in Hollywood.”
While Rogen previously said he would continue to work with Franco, he expressed a different point of view in recent interviews.
“The truth is that I have not and I do not plan to [work with Franco] right now,” Rogen told The Sunday Times in May 2021.
Seven months later, Franco reacted to his former costar’s words, saying his statement was true.
“We aren’t working together right now and we don’t have any plans to work together,” Franco said on SiriusXM’s The Jess Cagle Show. “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.”
“I love Seth Rogen. I worked with him for 20 years,” he continued. “We didn’t have one fight for 20 years. Not one fight. He was my absolute closest work friend, collaborator. We just gelled.”
Moving forward, Franco is grateful to have the opportunity to act again in his new movie Hey Joe. In the drama, Franco plays an alcoholic American WWII vet who winds up in Naples in the early ’70s in search of a son he fathered there.
The film marks Franco’s second film to be released since 2019.
“I had to change my whole way of life,” he told Variety. “So I am proud of the kind of work I did during that time. And yeah, I wasn’t working in movies, but I certainly was doing a lot of work to change who I was.”
Us Weekly has reached out to Rogen’s team for comment on Franco’s latest interview.
