14 DAY TRIAL // For several weeks now, James Franco has been posting a series of very revealing selfies to his Instagram, culminating with one he says he was forced to take down because it upset too many people. He complied with the request but, even so, he says he shouldn’t have because all his selfies, rude or ruder, are actually an art statement.
The actor was on David Letterman the other night and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the topic of his selfies came up. You will find that segment from the interview embedded below, at the end of this blog post.
Franco says he takes these shots because “that’s what the public wants” and because he sees no difference between his bare-chested pics and the billboard of David Beckham in his underwear, his latest ad campaign for H&M.
He points out that the only thing different about these two situations is context.
“Like that Britney Spears shaved head moment, where it’s sort of like, ‘All right, you want me? Here you can have me, but I am going to be really ugly.’ You know what I mean?” he adds.
According to Franco, his selfies, as offensive or creepy or gross as they are (and some of them have been deemed much worse than that) stem from self-hatred – but “not like hatred of myself but like hatred of the public self.”
