Actor James Franco will return to the 'General Hospital' (GH) this fall for another stint of the daytime TV acting he considers 'performance art'. The show's rep confirmed the professionally hyperactive actor will be reprising his role as aptly named Franco for a 'longterm' appearance this season and possibly beyond.
In 2009, the Oscar-nominated actor first joined the soap opera as Franco, a multimedia artist and serial killer, and returned for a two-episode cameo this February. James Franco wrote a Wall Street Journal column about the world of performance art and how he 'took the plunge' by messing with viewers' minds as a conventional GH character.
James Franco wrote, 'I disrupted the audience's suspension of disbelief'. 'Because no matter how far I got into the character, I was going to be perceived as something that doesn't belong to the incredibly stylized world of soap operas... My hope was for people to ask themselves if soap operas are really that far from entertainment that is considered critically legitimate'.
In 2010, James Franco's GH counterpart held an exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles at the same time the real Franco held an exhibit about his experience on the show. Doing super trippy meta stuff must also be an elitist art form.
