James Franco on the Oscar Hosting Disaster: "I'm Going Down, and There's No Way Out"

Remember at this year's Oscars when James Franco came onstage in Marilyn Monroe drag? Well, he'd like you to know that was totally not his idea. The actor recently spoke with Playboy magazine and gave some insight on what exactly went wrong with this year's Academy Awards.

The actor's response to accusations that he appeared blasé or bored:

I thought, Okay, Anne is going the enthusiastic route. I’ve been trained as an actor to respond to circumstances, to the people I’m working with, and not to force anything. So I thought I would be the straight man and she could be the other, and that’s how I was trying to do those lines. I felt kind of trapped in that material. I felt, This is not my boat. I’m just a passenger, but I’m going down and there’s no way out.

Franco was so unhappy with the evening that he even took to his Twitter account during the ceremony as a way to say, “'Whatever you’re seeing and hearing, those are other people’s words. I’m lifting the curtain and you can see a little bit of what’s going on.' It was cutting-edge. No host has ever done that—given you that kind of alternative glimpse. I was trying to do the best job I could. I didn’t try to sabotage the show. I didn’t get high. I went to the rehearsals I said I was going to. I played the lines as I thought they should be played."

In this interview Franco seems particularly incensed about that Marilyn Monroe costume:

I was so pissed about that I was deliberately going to fall onstage and hopefully my dress would fall off or something—they couldn’t blame that on me; I was in high heels. The plan had been that I was going to sing as Cher and then Cher was going to come out onstage; that got axed when Cher and the song from Burlesque weren’t nominated. I told them, “Look, this is the thing people are going to talk about, the images they will take away from the show.” I mean, think about it—Anne Hathaway sang a song about Hugh ­Jackman, who not only wasn’t nominated, I don’t think he even had a movie out last year. So whatever. I just didn’t want to fight anymore, even when they said, “You’ll come out as Marilyn Monroe. It’ll be funny.” Me in drag is not funny. Me in drag as Cher trying to sing like her is a thing. That didn’t happen, so then I just didn’t want to argue anymore. I was going with their program; I wanted to do the material they gave me, not be one of the many cooks doing the writing. There were a lot of cooks who shouldn’t have been cooking but were allowed to. There were some cooks my manager tried to bring in, like Judd Apatow, who wrote some very funny stuff that wasn’t used.

Playboy's questions about his Oscar hosting performance sound like they agitated the actor, but he was fairly sanguine when asked why he's been dogged for years with rumors about his sexuality.

I had a close friend in school, and there were rumors that we were gay. Those rumors were started by—who knows?—people who were jealous, ­people who had been picked on, girls who had been picked on. So they started these rumors. I like it now that people said I was gay. It’s kind of cool.

You can read the entire James Franco Playboy interview here.