An excerpt attained by Radar Online from actress Busy Phillipps' memoir depicts the moment when actor James Franco pushed Philipps to the ground. The incident is said to have occurred on the set of 1999 TV series Freaks and Geeks. Philipps alleges that Franco's demeanor was rather cold and that he was a “f—ing” bully on set.
In the excerpt, Philipps describes a scene in which she was asked to lightly strike Franco. Philipps claims that Franco couldn't handle the contact and proceeded to lose his cool, breaking character to aggressively confront Phillps. “He grabbed both my arms and screamed in my face, ‘DON’T EVER TOUCH ME AGAIN!'” she wrote in her memoir. “And he threw me to the ground. Flat on my back. Wind knocked out of me.” Philipps claims that directors and producers of the show demanded that Franco apologize, and he complied, apologizing to her the next day.
In the past, Philips has revealed that her relationship with the The Interview actor has been tense since it begun. Back in 2016, while on Andy Cohen’s Watch What Happens Live she revealed, “He felt like he wanted his character to be one way. He had had a discussion with the producers that he came from an abused family or something, and so he didn’t want his girlfriend — I played his girlfriend — to ever physically hit him." She went on to share, "I never knew this conversation existed, and in an improv, I smacked him on the thing, and he was like, ‘Don’t ever touch me,’ and grabbed me and shoved me to the ground. It was an overreaction by a 19-year-old dude. And it was weird and people’s agents had to be called and he had to apologize to me.”