Actor-director-intellectual James Franco penned an essay to tell us all about the time he was James Franco the McDonald's employee. Franco had dropped out of UCLA to pursue his acting career, and his parents told him they'd cut the financial cord if he wasn't in college. After losing out on a bunch of waiter gigs, he responded to someone's challenge of "Are you too good for McDonald's?" by working at McDonald's.
But before we get to his McDonald's shenanigans, let's step back to look at his high school job experience:
In high school, I was fired from a coffee shop for reading behind the counter and from a golf course for reading while driving the cart on the driving range.
What a nerd!
Somehow Franco didn't hate his job at the Golden Arches, like most people do while they're chasing a career. (One time I cleaned vomit out of urinal while working as a door guy at a college bar, and I'll never say anything nice about that hell hole.) Despite being propositioned for mid-shift sex by a hamburger cooker who didn't speak English, bailing on his vegetarianism because the temptation of free food for a poor actor was too great, and having to deal with parents ordering for groups of children (aka the devil incarnate), he actually enjoyed his time at McDonald's.
I refrained from reading on the job, but soon started putting on fake accents with the customers to practice for my scenes in acting class.
As bad as the accents were (Brooklynese, Italian, British, Irish, Russian, Southern), people actually found them persuasive. I was asked to give Italian lessons to a cute young woman who thought I was from Pisa; of course I couldn’t follow up as I did not speak Italian. The casting director for "NYPD Blue" liked my British accent, but was put off when I revealed that I was actually just a California boy. A couple of people wanted to fight my spunky Irish self. And I went on several dates as a thick-tongued kid from Bed-Stuy, even though my only brush with the actual place had been through watching "Do the Right Thing."
Ahhh. There it is, the key to surviving any shitty job: fucking around.
Franco admits Fast Food Nation turned him off of the meat but also copped to picking up a cheeseburger every once and a while. And being the great wordsmith that he is, he coined what should be McDonald's new tagline: "light, and airy, and satisfying."
Nevermind that McDonald's makes you feel like you're dragging around a brick of lead in your stomach. It was there for James Franco, which means it was there for us.
Read the full essay at the Washington Post.
