To many, James Franco boasts the most ­enviable—or is it annoying?—résumé in show business. Although only 33, he has spent the past few years wowing his fans and aggravating his critics by doing too much and doing much of it extremely well. Take just this past year or so: The offbeat, unpredictable star grabbed a best actor Oscar nomination for 127 Hours, in which he plays Aron Ralston, the stranded real-world mountaineer who amputated his own arm to save himself. He also played Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in Howl and squeezed in supporting roles with Steve Carell and Tina Fey in Date Night, Julia Roberts in Eat Pray Love and Natalie Portman in Your Highness. On TV he continued a recurring self-reflexive stint as a mysterious artist on the long-running soap General Hospital.

For most people that would be a rich, full year. But Franco also earned his MFA at ­Columbia University while simultaneously attending NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, pursuing a Ph.D. in English at Yale and studying digital media at Rhode Island School of Design, and also, for good measure, became one of 20 students selected out of 400 applicants for the 2012 Ph.D. literature and creative writing program at the University of Houston. He published a book of interlaced tales of teen disaffection, Palo Alto. His conceptual art projects for major galleries and museums—in which his celebrity and public persona were as much context as ­subject—dovetailed with his well-known presence on Twitter. He also continued to direct films, including one about backstage life on Saturday Night Live, as well as the award- winning black-and-white The Feast of Stephen, in which a young dweeb gets beaten up for fantasizing about the bobbling private parts of naked young bucks playing pickup basketball. Then, atop TV interviews in which many noted his poise, smarts and trippy different drummer-ness, he baffled many viewers with his deadpan, too-cool co-hosting of the 2011 Oscars ceremony, actually tweeting during the show.

Is it any surprise the actor now openly wonders if he faces a backlash from even stalwart Franco-philes?

Few actors are the subject of as much fascination and speculation. Sure, he’s an undisputed talent, but is he also a showboat performance artist using acting and fame as his canvas? Is he a professional superstudent, capable of achieving an above-3.5 grade-point average while taking 62 credits a quarter and maintaining a red-hot movie career? Is he a dyed-in-the-wool artist and eccentric, or does he merely get off on playing weird? Is he straight, gay, bi, or is he too busy with lofty artistic pursuits to bother with worldly pleasure? Is he a true Renaissance man or a gifted, overachieving gadfly?

Franco grew up in Palo Alto, California, the first of three boys raised by Betsy, a children’s book author, and Douglas, who runs a nonprofit agency and a shipping container company. Talented in both painting and math but shy around girls, Franco interned briefly at Lockheed Martin. During high school, he not only starred in plays but also entangled himself in a series of infractions (including drinking, theft and tagging) that led to his being put on probation. He straightened up, improved his grades and entered UCLA as an English major but dropped out after his freshman year to pursue acting. His first big break was on the TV cult favorite Freaks and Geeks, followed by a much-talked-about performance as James Dean in a TV biopic. Then came Spider-Man—though Tobey Maguire beat him out for the lead role. Two sequels followed but so too did smaller, edgier movies such as An American Crime and The Dead Girl, as well as several uncredited roles in The Green Hornet, Knocked Up and Nights in Rodanthe. He scored grand slams in Pineapple Express and Milk, and he’s a regular presence on the Funny or Die website, in videos that often feature his family members.

We sent Contributing Editor Stephen Rebello, who last interviewed Josh Brolin for ­­Playboy, to meet with Franco in a studio in a historic building in Manhattan’s artsy Chelsea neighborhood. “Franco was a trip,” says Rebello. “He’s highly verbal, thoughtful, generous, unapologetically eccentric and apparently so comfortable in his own skin that he seems to welcome the chance to shed light on his utterly unique head space and unconventional behavior—but only some light, mind you. As serious and dedicated as he is about his art and his education, his jokester’s playfulness gives you the sense that he enjoys challenging people’s notions of celebrity, behavior and masculinity. A movie star who might morph into a fascinating director, he refuses to be tamed, categorized, boxed in or defined. That may turn out to be his greatest act of rebellion yet.”