In December, as the manhunt for Luigi Mangione — the man accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson — took the internet by storm, the web inevitably got around to casting the non-existent movie about the alleged murderer. One name came up over and over and over: Dave Franco. Memes comparing their features have popped up into the feeds frequently, and now that Franco has a hit horror flick in theaters (“Together“), the speculative fan casting is heating back up again.
On “Watch What Happens Live,” Franco discussed the rumor when asked by a caller about it directly. And so far… nothing’s happening, though the door seems to be cracked.
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“No one has approached me about it yet, I’ll say that,” he said. “This is something that more people in my life reached out about, this exact thing, [more] than anything else that has ever happened… so let’s just say, I’m open if it’s the right people, and let’s leave it at that.”
This echoes a similar statement he made in January, when he told THR, “Anyone who has my phone number has reached out about it.” But now Franco is saying he’s open to it on the record. Get to work, Hollywood.
Fan casting has had some success in the age of social media. Elle Fanning, for instance, credited the internet with getting her cast in “The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping.” “I think fans made this happen in a way,” Fanning told MTV last month. “The studio [Lionsgate] said they were getting kind of hounded online, like, ‘Elle needs to play Effie.’”
Franco is at the start of a busy run for the home stretch of 2025. “Regretting You,” co-starring Allison Williams, will release October 24, while the all-star heist movie “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t” — the latest in the “Now You See Me” franchise — will hit theaters November 14. He also had a three-episode arc as a hard-partying version of himself on “The Studio.”
His wife and “Together” co-star Alison Brie worked together in another horror film, Franco’s directorial debut “The Rental” — released in an unusual hybrid fashion during the pandemic. When asked if Brie would like to turn the tables and direct Franco, Brie said she would “love to,” but she’s working on a project she’s written with Alice Stanley Jr. that she plans to direct and, “It’s truly, like, an all-female cast.”
In a recent interview with IndieWire, Brie said that there were “endless benefits” working together as a married couple on set. “I felt like so much of the work on the history of this couple was already done just by our history and knowing that we have a base of love between us. Even when the couple is in distress, we knew that baseline would exist for them, and that was really helpful,” she explained.
Franco said they would discuss the next day’s shoot at home the night before. “The fact that we were living together meant we could rehearse as much as we wanted,” he said. “We could come to set every day and hit the ground running, knowing we have just one or two takes.”
