James Franco: 'Born in the right time'

11.22.63. Monday, Hulu.

His character in Hulu's new Stephen King series 11.22.63 is a time-traveler, but James Franco is in no hurry himself to take leave of the 21st century.

"There are great things about the past, and there are horrible things about the past. I was probably born in the right time," Franco told a small group of reporters last month after a Hulu news conference.

He's probably right.

It's hard to imagine a movie star in the early '60s — where Franco's Jake Epping goes in

11.22.63 to try to prevent the assassination of President John F. Kennedy — would have made the kind of career choices the 37-year-old Franco occasionally has, including a longtime recurring role on the daytime soap General Hospital, and the recent agreement to remake the 1996 Tori Spelling movie Mother, May I Sleep with Danger for Lifetime.

Spelling will appear in Franco's version as the mother, he said.

He took the job, he said, "because Will Ferrell had done Deadly Adoption, and Will told me he was actually inspired by my going on General Hospital."

So when Lifetime asked him if he'd like to re-create "one of their movies, like Will did, I said yes, as long as I could change it a bit. So, it has some of the similar elements of the original, but it's completely revamped.

"I didn't see Will's. To me, it sounded like, conceptually, what he did was amazing. It sort of sounded in line with what I had done in General Hospital. ... I didn't want to change anything — I wanted to have the full soap-opera makeover. And it sounds like Will and Kristen Wiig wanted to have the Lifetime makeover."

But having done that, he's not interested in repeating himself.

"You'll have a very non-Lifetime movie on Lifetime when mine comes out," Franco said.

Hulu can probably thank a book about some of television's top showrunners for the former Freaks and Geeks star's interest in working in the long-form project, based on King's 11/22/63 and produced by J.J. Abrams (Star Wars: The Force Awakens).

"I got involved with this, and then I just shot a pilot for HBO with David Simon The Wire, directed by Michelle MacLaren from Breaking Bad, called The Deuce ... right after I read this book called Difficult Men, which is about a lot of the showrunners in the new golden age of TV," Franco said.

The book showed him the possibilities of "these new cable shows that have a limited number of episodes a season," he said.

"A lot of times in movies, you get a great character, or you get a great film, but there are a limited number of scenes that you do in a movie. And in a series, or a series like this, you get to explore so much more. And I was really turned on by that idea," Franco said, "and was fortunate enough to get two projects with incredible storytellers, where I would get that experience of getting to, you know, perform in a much bigger and longer arc."

There's humor, but not much Franco-style quirkiness in his 11.22.63 character, an English teacher who undertakes a crusade at the behest of a diner owner (Chris Cooper) who has discovered a portal to the past.

"It was pretty clear-cut. It's an Everyman character, and I've learned that when you have an Everyman character who's matched up with extraordinary circumstances ... you need to sort of be a bit of the straight man," Franco said.

"I got to direct [the sixth episode], and there were a lot of insane things happening in that."

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