Actor Dave Franco Talks ‘Idiots’ & More w/O’Shea Jackson Jr.

With O'Shea Jackson Jr. behind the desk and fully in his element, Dave Franco stopped by to talk about their new movie Idiots, in theaters August 28th, and the two friends turned a press hit into a genuine hang.

The throughline was a shared inheritance: famous family. Franco was candid that for the first decade of his career, every interview and audition was about his brother James, and it took a long time to get his own due, even if he would not trade having a sibling who had already been through everything. Jackson knew the feeling intimately, given that he shares an exact name with his father, Ice Cube, and once played him on screen in Straight Outta Compton. He found his own lane, he said, by staying true to himself, from co-hosting radio to running the Rich Eisen Show to nerding out about wrestling with TJ Jefferson.

That self-assurance was on full, hilarious display in the form of a painting. Jackson brought a portrait of himself to guest host, and the room could not stop pointing at it, the perfect emblem of a man comfortable enough to sit in Rich's raised, Phil Jackson-style chair and make the show his own. He and Franco also bonded over their prominent eyebrows, declaring themselves eyebrow brothers and joking the family feature should be insured.

On the movie itself, Franco explained that Idiots follows two down-on-their-luck dummies who agree to drive a rich teenager to rehab, only to discover the kid is a full-blown psychopath determined to make their lives hell. He had talked to director Macon Blair about the script a decade ago, was too young then, and revived it years later. Jackson was the first and only choice for his partner in crime, because the whole film rides on their chemistry, and the role pushed Jackson into real vulnerability, including a scene where Franco started crying and Jackson had to match him.

Then came the part Franco warned was intense: making horror movies with his wife, Alison Brie. The couple has worked together roughly five times, but their latest, Together, was the most full-on experience of all. They play a codependent pair who get infected with something that makes them ill when apart, escalating until their bodies literally begin fusing. There were days, Franco said, when they were stuck together by a prosthetic for hours, which meant going to the bathroom together, him standing over her, attached, looking into her eyes. After every day, they told each other they could not have made it with anyone else. Jackson, for the record, wanted no part of the genre, recalling how fake blood on Cocaine Bear left his hand a magnet for every wasp and mosquito on set.

Franco's commitment has a name on this show, coined by Jackson: going Full Franco, the point where Dave stops acting and transforms. Jackson traced it to the short-lived Quibi series The Now, whose comedy opened with Franco's character hanging himself, veins popping because Franco did not know how to fake it. A similar choke scene in Idiots, Jackson said, had Franco literally turning purple between takes.

The nostalgia ran deep too. Jackson confessed to watching Lego Ninjago as a kid, in which Franco voiced Lloyd, which led to a riff on voiceover work and Franco's recent turn as the villain in the Pixar film Hoppers, a performance so unhinged that the animators gave his character an Exorcist-style backwards walk down the stairs and parents now thank him for the nightmares. Franco even passed along a pro tip about the studio's "Adam Driver bar," a rail by the microphone that Driver used for his Star Wars sessions and that Franco ended up gripping for dear life.

That tied neatly back to the host, since Jackson has his own Star Wars credit in Obi-Wan Kenobi, a role he called a dream come true and a tribute to his late grandmother Delores, who loved the saga. Pressed for a favorite, he balanced Star Wars against Ingrid Goes West, the indie that proved he was serious, and told the origin story of landing it: complaining on Twitter after losing track of Aubrey Plaza at an award show, getting a DM, and introducing himself to her as Batman, only to learn his character was Batman-obsessed. As for Franco's favorite role of Jackson's, he saved it for last and the timing was perfect. Idiots.