James Franco Says He’s ‘Honestly Moved Past’ His Controversies: ‘I’m Just Trying to Move On’

James Franco is leaving the past in the past.

The actor, 46, spoke to Variety ahead of the Rome Film Festival premiere of his movie Hey Joe, revealing what it was like to go from a beloved star to a Hollywood outcast after he was accused of sexually inappropriate behavior by five women, four of whom were his acting students. (Franco settled a lawsuit with two of the women in 2021.)

“I mean, it is what it is,” he said in the interview published on Oct. 25. “I’ve honestly moved past it. It was dealt with, and I got to change. So that’s it, it’s over. I mean, I’ve worked in the U.S. too. So I’m just trying to move on.”

The Freaks and Geeks alum also told the outlet that it’s “painful” to be “told you’re bad,” adding, “But ultimately, that’s kind of what I needed to just stop going the way I was going.”

“So now, after having the pause and, I think, changing priorities, I guess what I seek to fulfill me in life [is different],” Franco continued.

As a result of having that pause, he added, “Ultimately, I think I’m kind of grateful because it did afford me a chance to just do whatever private work and really change what I need to change.”

“So now that I am working, I can just be there for the project,” the This Is the End actor said. “It’s not about me trying to fill some hole with work, it’s just about, ‘Wow, I have a really great life. I’m very grateful, and I hope to serve whatever project I do.’ ”

While he didn’t work during the lawsuit, “I did certainly use the time to, I hope, good purpose,” Franco told Variety. “And whatever had been going on with me before, I had to change my whole way of life.”

“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,” he explained.

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Franco previously broke his silence about the sexual-misconduct allegations against him in December 2021, nearly four years after they were made.

“There were people that were upset with me and I needed to listen,” he said in part during a wide-ranging interview on SiriusXM’s The Jess Cagle Podcast. “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.”

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“Whatever you did, even if it was a gaff or you said something wrong or whatever, there’s probably an iceberg underneath that behavior, of patterning, of just being blind to yourself that isn’t gonna just be solved overnight,” he said.

“So I’ve just been doing a lot of work,” Franco told Cagle, “and I guess I’m pretty confident in saying like, four years, you know? I was in recovery before for substance abuse. There were some issues that I had to deal with that were also related to addiction. And so I’ve really used my recovery background to kind of start examining this and changing who I was.”