Dedicated Actor James Franco Slices Off a Piece of His Thumb

COMMENTARY | Actor James Franco doesn't let a little thing like losing a part of his thumb get in the way of his job. Franco was directing and acting in the film "The Broken Tower," a black and white docudrama about the tragic life of poet Hart Crane, when the injury occurred.

The low-budget film is set in a remote town in Mexico, and Franco only had one chance to capture the scene.

According to ABC 2, Franco said:

"It was this part right before his suicide where he thinks he's lost his talent and he's destroying his typewriter and he's supposed to throw it down a few times and then stomp on it. So I said, 'Action,' ran in, picked up the typewriter and threw it. Picked it up, threw it again. And by that time it was mangled, so when I threw it down the third time, it took part of my thumb with it."

In the middle of nowhere, Franco didn't have access to another typewriter, so he had to keep performing through the pain. The committed actor said he just held on to his thumb until the scene was over and yelled, "Cut...and it's bleeding all over."

Unfortunately, in such a secluded area, there aren't many options for medical care, so Franco was taken to what he said looked like an ambulance garage, where inside a television was blasting a horror movie at full volume. The surgeon was sleeping through all the noise when he was awakened and asked to repair Franco's thumb.

The surgeon began to argue with his friend about what tool to use while the loud pitched screams continued to blast out of the TV set. Franco decided to just wrap gauze around the injury and wait until they got to Vera Cruz, where he met a doctor who "zapped it" with a laser.

The actor is incredibly dedicated and hard-working, and is currently working on getting his Ph.D. at Yale as well as teaching a film class at NYU and taking writing and poetry classes. The super smart and sexy actor stars in "Rise of the Planet of the Apes," which will be released Friday.

Franco said the issue focused on in "Apes" is "the moral complexities of scientific research." He commented to the Detroit Free Press:

"I am optimistic about science. The experiments that we're pretending to do in this film are to cure Alzheimer's. I think that's fine. What's questionable about the way the scientists in the film are working is how they treat the animals, how they test the animals, how disposable they are."

Franco likes to push the envelope, and in this film it's more about the cutting edge of technology than anything else. He says that Caesar the ape has really pushed the boundaries of what a realistic ape can do. The feelings that can be read into Caesar's eyes are created through technology, but they are so real that it makes it easy to connect to the primate.

With all of Franco's different endeavors, no wonder he didn't let a little thing like a missing piece of his thumb get in the way.