James Franco likes the “explosive” tension of Twilight

Actor James Franco is on the cover of the upcoming issue of Esquire, and during his interview for the mag, he copped up to reading Twilight, and why he’s into it.

There’s a paperback, palm-pinched, cover down, in his right hand, and a big plastic shopping bag full up with something he doesn’t want to show just yet. When asked what he’s reading, Franco smiles his ungrudgingly adolescent smile, a grin as terminally satisfying as the last healthy squeeze on a tube of toothpaste. He is engaging, for just a second, in the mutual diction of actor and artist — “It’s for a project,” he says. But the word — project — thumps out of him unprecious and without bluster, as if he were naming a day of the week. He’s always got something going. He flips the book over. Twilight.Keep in mind: The position of things is such that he doesn’t have to show the book. Had he said Jude the Obscure, no one would have been the wiser. He’s a graduate student, after all, enrolled in two universities at pretty much any given moment. “It’s crazy how much sexual tension there is,” he says. “It just builds and builds. I mean it never stops. It’s sort of explosive by the end. Crazy. Like they’ll blow up with it. And of course, they don’t.” He shrugs then, a good shrug, because he is selling nothing with it. “Which is the point too, I guess.”

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