James Edward Franco is an American actor and filmmaker. He has starred in numerous films, including Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy (2002–2007), Milk (2008), Eat Pray Love (2010), Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), Spring Breakers (2012), and Oz the Great and Powerful (2013). He is known for his collaborations with fellow actor Seth Rogen, having appeared in eight films and one television series with him, examples being Pineapple Express (2008), This Is the End (2013), Sausage Party (2016), and The Disaster Artist (2017), for which he won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor. For his role in 127 Hours (2010), he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor.

James Edward Franco was born in Palo Alto, California on April 19, 1978. His mother, Betsy Lou (née Verne), is a children's book author and occasional actress, and his father, Douglas Eugene Franco, ran a Silicon Valley business. His father was of Portuguese and Swedish ancestry, while his mother was from a family of Russian Jews. His paternal grandmother, Marjorie (née Peterson), is a published author of young adult books. His maternal grandfather, Daniel, changed his surname from "Verovitz" to "Verne" some time after 1940, and his maternal grandmother, Mitzie (née Levine), owned the prominent Verne Art Gallery in Cleveland, Ohio and was an active member in the National Council of Jewish Women.

Franco has described himself as Jewish; regarding his secular upbringing, he told The Guardian that he feels as if he has "missed out on the Jewish experience", but has been told not to worry about that by his Jewish friends and said in the same interview that he likes "the idea of religion as a source of community". When asked if he was a "believer", he responded, "In God? I don't know. Yes. To a certain extent. It's a complicated question." In 2015, he had an official bar mitzvah ceremony, presided over by a rabbi.