Tommy Wiseau has a “contractually obligated” cameo in James Franco’s The Disaster Artist
James Franco has been working on The Disaster Artist, his adaptation of Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell’s delightfully weird story of the making of The Room, for a while now, with filming finally finishing not that long ago. Besides the requisite scenes of “Oh hi Mark” and Lisa tearing people apart, though, the movie’s camera apparently captured a set-up that might be even weirder than the stuff in the movie’s source material: a “contractually obligated” cameo scene between Franco, in character as abysmal auteur Tommy Wiseau, and the actual man himself.
That’s per an interview Franco gave with Collider this week, discussing his upcoming The Adderall Diaries. According to the actor-director, the experience of working opposite Wiseau was “surreal,” as one might expect, and he’s not sure whether the resulting scene will make it into the film. We can only hope that that’s a bit of pre-release prevarication, though, because we can’t think of a scene that captures the self-indulgent phenomenon of The Room better than the actual Tommy Wiseau mumbling incoherently at a fictitious Hollywood version of himself, as played by the big-name movie star he sincerely believes himself to be.
The scene was apparently a legal condition of the making of the movie, which tells the story of Wiseau’s friendship with Sestero, his roommate and eventual co-star. Franco’s brother Dave plays Sestero in the film.