Biopics are a hot commodity, but they’re also tricky business, especially when it comes to casting. Should you go with the actor who is most able to embody the subject’s mannerisms, or should you cast the actor who most closely resembles the subject? It’s a tough call, but sometimes everything works out perfectly, as seems to have happened with the casting of James Franco as Tommy Wiseau in the upcoming film The Disaster Artist — though, it must be said, Franco did cast himself. But with that wig and his over-the-top, wooden acting, Franco checks all of the Wiseau boxes.
Franco also cast his brother, Dave, alongside Kate Upton, Zac Efron, Seth Rogen, Jacki Weaver, Hannibal Buress, Ari Graynor, and Josh Hutcherson in the film, which will recount the disastrous filming and aftermath of Wiseau’s best-known effort, The Room. More specifically, the film is based on the book of the same name, written by The Room actor Greg Sestero (played here by Dave Franco) and Tom Bissell.
Hopefully this film will be more of a film than Franco’s last attempt at a kind of recreation, Interior. Leather Bar., which painfully manufactured gay-crisis drama through an “experimental” reshoot of the 1980s cult-classic, Cruising. There’s no reason to think this won’t be a straight adaptation of the book, but, if we’ve learned anything over the past decade, it’s that very little of what Franco does could be called typical. We’ll find out when it’s released sometime in 2016.