In high school he played a class-cutting "Freak," but young Franco was a math wiz who interned at Lockheed Martin.
The actor has since made a hobby of picking up college degrees. After graduating from UCLA, he moved to New York and enrolled at NYU for filmmaking, Columbia University and Brooklyn College for fiction writing, Warren Wilson College in North Carolina for a low-residency poetry program, and Yale for comparative literature.
He's also taught screenplay-writing and directing at UCLA, USC, NYU, and Columbia.