Variety reports that James Franco has been given a role in Billie August’s post-World War II thriller Me, You. The novel Tu, Mia by Erri De Luca is the inspiration for the play. Alongside Franco, Tom Hollander (The Night Manager) and Daisy Jacob (Vanity Fair) also star in Me, You.
The drama takes place in the 1950s as the globe emerges from a devastating war on the Italian island of Ischia. The only thing 16-year-old Marco wants to do with his days off from boarding school is sail the calm seas of the Bay of Naples with actor Franco’s portrayal of Nicola, a hardened fisherman and former soldier. After falling deeply in love with Jacob’s portrayal of the young Caia, Marco is ready to leave.
Caia tells Marco that she was saved from a concentration camp by her father in Yugoslavia, who tossed her out of a train. Marco develops strong animosity toward people with German ancestry as a result of her stories and those he had heard from the fisherman Nicola, a former U.S. GI. Marco decided to go big by starting an arson attack on the Germans’ home after first getting into a fight with several visiting German tourists.
Numerous women accused Franco of sexual assault in 2018 during the height of the #MeToo movement. In 2019, students from his film school sued Franco and his partners, claiming they had been forced into filming explicit sex scenes while they were on camera. This put him back in the spotlight for the wrong reasons. The case was settled with a $2,235,000 payment from Franco and his partners by all parties.