As we reported yesterday, James Franco’s adaptation of The Disaster Artist is slated to premiere at SXSW. The movie will track the making of The Room, a cult classic film about a simple businessman trapped in a web of lies, friends, passionate love-making, a spectral “room” full of forks, and also breast cancer. Franco is both directing and starring in the movie, a double-whammy made more difficult by the fact that the movie’s original star, Tommy Wiseau, seemed to dwell within the uncanny valley of human emotion. His intonations and the very texture of his flesh seemed the product of a shoddily designed, perhaps malfunctioning PlayStation 2 game. While impressions of Wiseau are a dime a dozen—anyone who has ever seen The Room has bellowed “hai Mark” once or twice—truly inhabiting the role will be one of Franco’s hardest tasks to date.


On Instagram, he shared the first clue as to how that is going:


The flowing locks and frumpy suit are a close match, and while Franco is movie-star handsome, whereas Wiseau is (let’s say) movie-star rugged, Franco nails the rumpled, world-weary suspicion that defines Wiseau’s performance in The Room. We will just have to wait to see if he can capture the moment when that suspicion boils over into an apocalyptic fury unleashed on an unsuspecting TV set.