Actor James Franco didn't find Ricky
Gervais' swipe at John Travolta during the Golden Gloves to be funny.
The 49-year-old Gervais unleashed his
joke a month after Carrie
Fisher outed Travolta as gay.
“Not nominated, I Love You Phillip
Morris,” Gervais said in his opening monologue referring to the
gay-themed romantic-comedy. “Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor. Two
heterosexual actors pretending to be gay. So the complete opposite
of some famous scientologist then.”
The line hit a nerve with the audience
and Gervais added, “Probably.”
“My lawyers helped me with the
wording of that joke,” he said. (The video is embedded in the
right panel of this page.)
Franco, who will co-host the Oscars on
Sunday with Anne Hathaway, told
USA Today that he didn't find Gervais to be that amusing.
“I haven't really read about the
fallout of Ricky Gervais,” Franco told the paper. “I was there
and I didn't think he was that funny. The jokes were kind of – gay
Scientology jokes? South Park did that like five years ago.
So I don't really want to do Ricky Gervais' style.”
Franco
recently suggested he might be gay in responding to such rumors.