Dave Franco

David John Franco (born June 12, 1985) is an American actor and filmmaker. He began his career with small roles in films such as Superbad (2007) and Charlie St. Cloud (2010). Following a starring role in the ninth season of the comedy series Scrubs, Franco had his film breakthrough as a supporting role in the buddy comedy film 21 Jump Street (2012). Franco has also starred in Fright Night (2011), Now You See Me (2013) and its sequel Now You See Me 2 (2016), Neighbors (2014), Nerve (2016), The Disaster Artist (2017), and Day Shift (2022). In 2020, he made his directorial debut with The Rental, which starred his wife Alison Brie. Early life Franco was born in Palo Alto, California, to Betsy Lou (née Verne), a poet, children's book author, and editor, and Douglas Eugene Franco (1948–2011), who ran a nonprofit agency and a business; the two met as students at Stanford University. Franco's father was of Portuguese (from Madeira) and Swedish descent. Franco's mother is Jewish (of Russian Jewish descent); her parents had changed the surname from "Verovitz" to "Verne". Franco's paternal grandmother, Marjorie (Peterson) Franco, is a published author of young adult books. Franco's maternal grandmother, Mitzie (Levine) Verne, owned the Verne Art Gallery, a prominent art gallery in Cleveland, and was an active member in the National Council of Jewish Women. Franco grew up in California with his two older brothers, James and Tom, both of whom are also actors. He studied at the University of Southern California, and originally envisioned himself as a high school teacher teaching creative writing, until his brother James Franco's manager guided him to a theater class when he was a sophomore, where he started learning acting skills.