The Specific Allure of Alison Brie

As Alison Brie laces up her rental shoes, she gives a wink-wink and provides an out. “We really don’t have to do this,” she says. We’re seated side-by-side on a cracked leather couch at Highland Park Bowl, L.A.’s oldest operating bowling alley. A quiet, young-ish couple and their two elementary schoolers flank us on our right; three adult children and their parents bickering over whose turn is first on our left. They’re all here for an afternoon of low-stakes competition and landmark tourism, pure fun. Brie and I, on the other hand, are trying to make fun out of a work-mandated interruption to the actress-writer-producer’s leisurely summer Friday in June.

The actress, 42, had gone on a walk that morning with her mom. She’d spent some time collecting and cutting videos from friends and family for a surprise virtual birthday card that “Davey”—as in Dave Franco, as in her husband, as in her co-star in many movies, including their latest codependency freakout Together—will open on his 40th the following week. Later that night, they’ll meet up for a dinner date.

But first, a game of pick-up bowling with me. I wish the hostess had given us the lane the young family is using—for the extra hint of privacy, and also for the bumpers. But we’re here. We should at least give bowling a shot; for the bit. We don’t even have to try. We can be a little silly, check the box, and move on to the actual agenda: digging into the jumpscares and scarily realistic resentment that made Together the “fucked up date night movie” everyone will see this summer; how she really felt about playing a dependent but bitter partner alongside her actual husband of a decade; what all her genre-hopping and hyper-productivity says about her talent.

To be fair, Brie is all upbeat energy. In her white tank top and wide-leg jeans, she moves with a bounce that is more than just her Salomon sneakers at work. She orders a Coke, even though she doesn’t drink soda, “but we’re in a bowling alley and it just feels right.” There’s chit-chat about how she used to come here as a teen with her drama club friends and a fake ID to belt out Pat Benatar's greatest hits on the nights the spot doubled as Mr. T.’s Bowl karaoke bar. She’s excited to talk, yes, but maybe not to bowl.

I consider that perhaps we should have resorted to one of those Beverly Hills Hotel lunches in so many celebrity profiles, when Brie steps up to the lane, tells me with a laugh to back up and give her room to roll. She brushes her chocolate brown hair over her shoulder, takes a few strides, and dips in a deep curtsy lunge while swinging the ball behind her. It sails out of her outstretched fingers and rolls—straight down the lane.

“That's my long con,” she says as she turns back to me, victorious. “I'm like,”—she takes her voice up to a girlish falsetto and blinks innocently, “I've never done this!”

Cut to forty-five minutes later, when the matter of breaking a tie feels as imperative to Brie as ensuring she says everything she wants to about staying hungry and working hard. Or maybe, this is her saying it. If she’s here, she’s going all-out.

The Alison who knew Highland Park Bowl by another name was a striver. Growing up in ’90s Pasadena, “I was not playing, like, ‘bride’ or ‘mommy,’” she remembers. She was auditioning for local theater productions at the Los Feliz Jewish Community Center. Toto in The Wizard of Oz was her gateway role; from then on out, acting was all she wanted to do. “It was wholesome in that I was not like, I'm gonna be a huge movie star, but I also would practice my Oscar speech in the bathroom,” she says.

According to her teenage logic, she could go from theater to a break in indie films or period pieces: “because those are the kinds of movies where they would cast unknowns.” In reality, she’d be auditioning while working as a party clown until her mid-twenties. Short films and a boisterous Hannah Montana cameo finally culminated in a double-booking on Community and Mad Men, filming one in the morning and the other in the afternoon. Showing her comedic range on the former and dramatic chops on the latter opened doors where Brie gained more recognition and autonomy with each step—a SAG- and Golden Globe-nominated turn on the canceled-before-its time GLOW, to writing her first feature-length script, 2020’s Horse Girl, to independent films and limited series like Apples Never Fall.

From set to set, she built a reputation blending charisma and no-holds-barred dedication, helping her make friends like GLOW’s Betty Gilpin. “I remember wondering, why do I not feel intimidated by someone this strong and confident and relaxed in such an anxiety-provoking setting, like a set?” she says of their early days working together. “Even though she's young, her hours logged in this business are pretty impressive. But I think that to be around Ali is to be really comfortable. I kind of immediately realized this is a person that I'm going to learn from.”

As Brie was working her way up through Hollywood, she was also falling in love with her eventual co-collaborator in life and in work, actor Dave Franco. Their courtship and 2017 marriage went from strictly under wraps to fodder for tabloid relationship timelines and virality-bait videos, like reading each other thirsty tweets and taking couples’ quizzes.

Nothing about their affection is an act. Over a Zoom in late June, Franco tells me—hands clasped over his Hawaiian shirt and a permanent smile for all 27 minutes on the line—that in their 14 years together, every time they’ve been apart, they’ve sent one another a “mini love letter” each night before bed. “It really makes you focus on the other person and let them know in a unique way, every single night, how much they mean to you,” Franco says. He also says that she’s his favorite actress like he’s founder, president, and events director of her official fan club, listing her attributes without a hint of spousal obligation to do so. “She is an incredible dramatic actress. She is so funny. She’s so athletic and can bring that physicality to her roles. There's literally no genre that she can't do,” he says.

The pair didn’t professionally link up until their raunchy 2012 Funny or Die! sketch. “I think, actually, early on in our relationship we had no desire to work together,” Brie says, sipping her Coke. “Early in your career, too, you're like, I want to prove myself and make my own name for myself.” But the creative chemistry was undeniable. They’d play a couple for a brief portion of The Disaster Artist in 2017. Franco would direct Brie in a horror for the short-term lease economy, 2020’s The Rental, and then again for the 2023 romantic comedy Somebody I Used to Know.

“We joke about being codependent, but I think we actually are very independent people,” Brie tells me when we hit pause on the bowling and sit down to chat. When they’re working on opposite coasts, or countries, “it's not like,”—here she throws her voice into a mock-yell, “Where's Dave?”

All their mutual public swooning makes their joint turn in Together so bizarrely, jarringly fun. They play Millie and Tim, a genre of couple we all know or have been halves of: They’ve been dating for a decade, but it seems like their shared history is all that’s keeping them together. Their careers are at odds, they know exactly which flaws to bring up in front of company for maximum hurt feelings, and they’re definitely not having sex anymore. When Millie gets a new teaching job, they move from the city to a tiny, secluded town in a bid to hit restart. With no one but each other to lean on and some sinister forces in the woods outside their home, romantic tropes like being totally inseparable and magnetically drawn toward one another are then pushed to their most literal, gasp-inducing interpretations.

Brie says Franco had opened up her appetite for horror, and they’d been looking for a project like Together when director Michael Shanks’s team reached out in 2022. “What's really unique about this movie is that the thing that's trying to get us, is inside of us,” she says. “It was this unique acting challenge to be fighting your own body.” Brie says they were both drawn to how codependency doesn’t just manifest in the script’s horror set pieces. It was also how Millie and Tim would butt heads even in dire circumstances. (If you’ve ever fought with a partner over directions, you might feel personally attacked by an argument over hiking seen in act one.)

The film premiered at Sundance in January to rave reviews and an instant bidding war for distribution rights. Neon acquired its worldwide release for $17 million—the biggest deal out of the festival this year. Shortly after, it faced a copyright infringement lawsuit concerning the story’s originality. According to Brie, in a written statement shared after our interview: "This is a sad reality of the business, unfortunately these types of claims come up all the time. Our screenwriter wrote the first draft of this script in 2019, a year before WME ever received the other script. We have an extensive paper trail, and we look forward to showing the court that these claims are frivolous.”

One thing is for certain: Shanks couldn’t have imagined a better actress to front his project than Brie. Her blend of comedic chops and dedication to the material meant the script sounded more natural— she improvised several lines that made their way into the final cut. She also did as much of her own stunt work as she could manage. When things like a 360-degree body contortion simply weren’t possible, she’d stretch her eyebrows and mouth into macabre expressions for scanning onto the actual contortionist’s body. “The whole time,” Shanks tells me over a Zoom from his office in Melbourne, Australia, “she was throwing herself into so much more of the film than I think would be expected of the lead actors.”

He means “throwing” literally. In one scene, the invisible string tying the couple together yanks on Mille so forcefully, she collides face-first with the glass door to their home office. A stunt double was supposed to handle the crash, but Brie just had to give it a bruise-inducing shot. Her take is what made it into the final cut.

Moments like these earned the project an unofficial title among the cast and crew, according to Shanks: “Torturing Dave and Alison.” Working on their most grossed-out scenes with little room for personal freedom—one day, Franco says, Brie was obligated to straddle him for a leg-numbing twelve hours—only made him more firm in his opinion: his wife is really the best actress. “There's nothing she won't do for the sake of the project to try to make it as great as it could possibly be,” he says.

I ask Brie if spending time inhabiting a couple at odds impacted their dynamic when it was time to wrap. “Dave jokes that the hardest part for this press tour is going to be convincing people that we actually have a good relationship,” Brie laughs. “I think we could not have done this movie if we didn't have a really healthy relationship. That would be its own horror movie.”

Brie ended up having a more positive souvenir from Together’s shoot: a new outlook. The entire film was shot in 22 days, rapid-fire by most studios’ standards. The actress took it as a sign she couldn’t waste a minute doubting herself on set. “Going into this job, I thought, there's no time for that bullshit. You know everything you need to know,” she says. “It was actually really freeing and really fun that I was like, there's no time to overthink anything, so don't. Let it rip, and Dave did the same. That's the mentality I want to have in life now.”

The Brie-Franco household—population: the couple and their two cats, Otis and Max—is currently in a quiet period. “We’re getting to a place of trying to find this nice balance between work and enjoying life together, and getting excited about growing older and getting even more cats together and moving even further into the wilderness,” Franco tells me. “Some people might say it's leaning even further into our codependency.”

But I suspect it would take a total ideas drought for Brie to stop creating—and even that might be a temporary setback. Even in a phase of life she describes as high artistry, lower pressure, she’s finding calls to explore new avenues in unlikely places. Weeks before we meet at Highland Park Bowl, Brie has a short break between Together’s first round of festival premieres and suiting up as the villain Evil-Lyn for Mattel’s Masters of the Universe adaptation shoot in London. She spends it on a stop by New York City, where she’ll cash in one of the most sought-after tickets on Broadway: the Tony-winning play Oh, Mary! where Gilpin is starring for a limited engagement.

Watching her friend inhabit an alt-history Mary Todd-Lincoln onstage at the Lyceum Theatre, “I had chills. I was sobbing,” Brie says. Pride in her former costar morphed into inspiration for another “exciting frontier”: theater. I ask if she’s got her sights set on Broadway, should the right script come along. She sits up a little straighter before she answers: “It terrifies me, and it's why I think I should do it.”

To be clear, she doesn’t have concrete plans to go back to her community theater roots yet. She’s tied up with plenty of other film and TV projects as it is. She’ll pull on Annie Eddison’s cardigans for a Community reboot film that’s in pre-production. She just signed on to lead Witness Protection, a thriller pilot for FX. She spent two weeks and a half in Kentucky filming The Revisionist, a “talky” indie drama, alongside Dustan Hoffman and Tom Sturridge.

Teaming up onscreen again with her husband isn’t out of the picture, but only when the time is right. “It’s certainly important to me to continue to do work by myself, and it's important to Dave too. I think also when we do work separately, we can bring back anything we learn to the work that we do together.” Brie smiles in the same ear-to-ear, totally smitten way her husband does when he talks about her. “I want to work with Dave for the rest of my life and be in love with him for the rest of my life.”

What about the birds’ eye view of her career? How does she think she’s being perceived? Franco tells me he loves that she’s “universally loved.” She’s a consistent crowd-favorite no matter her project, but I wonder if that reads the same as the industry recognition she earned in her prestige TV era. Brie tells me, “it feels weird to comment on it now, like in the middle of it.” For the first time, she’s addressing the straw of her Coke instead of me. “But also I feel like I've gone through phases of really high highs and low lows and learning who I was, and heartbreak and awkward moments and exciting moments, and now can settle into a lower stakes version of the whole thing.”

She admits she may have piled on the self-pressure in the earlier years to have a certain type of career—one where she wasn’t just consistently working, but also becoming known. (Gwyneth Paltrow’s 1999 Oscar win was a formative example for teen Alison.) Experience means she can keep dreaming big without worrying who will notice. She says she’s guided more by how it feels to make the movie or the show than whatever the outcome could be. Critical acclaim doesn’t hurt, though: In the lead-up to Together’s release, Brie’s Instagram stories were a near-daily ode to the film’s stellar rating on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.

She’s surprised herself even more by getting involved behind the camera. Writing has become her self-described “secret weapon.” When she produces independent films, she says, she wants to be involved from start to finish from now on. Directing an episode of GLOW morphed into directing an episode of a Disney Plus series. She likens taking the lead of an entire set as a “fear factor” experience. She’d shadowed directors and went to a seminar and read books—but nothing could compare to learning on the job. After she ripped off the proverbial Band-Aid, she says she realized more than she initially thought she knew.

“I think women carry a lot of self-doubt and we have a desire to make everything perfect before we attempt something, or we learn everything we can learn,” she says. “You want to really check the boxes and go, am I prepared for this? And at a certain point you have to just take the leap and believe in yourself.”

She’d felt ready to jump and hope the net would appear when the COVID pandemic and SAG-AFTRA strikes happened one after the other. They set projects already in production back by months, reshuffled budgets, and pushed Brie’s directing plans temporarily to the side. “It’s taken me five years, basically, to build back up the confidence and desire to want to do that and to find the right thing.”

I waited for Brie to bring up what I suspected would be that right thing. On Together’s Sundance press circuit, she’d sprinkled mentions of working with the “dark bubblegum” writer Alice Stanley Jr. on an upcoming script. Looking around and concluding a random entertainment reporter isn’t embedded in the bowling parties around us, she decides now is the time to make an addendum: She plans on directing the feature-length film, too. “While we were writing it,” she says, “I felt like I was writing it to direct it. I could see every shot in my head.”

As far as I can tell, we’re not at risk of getting scooped, so I press for more. All she’s ready to reveal, in a slightly lower voice, is that she’s still playing in the horror-comedy sandbox, albeit with a “female-forward, very fun energy.” After Together’s trial by entanglement, she recognizes diving head-first into creating her own horror story is a sign of character development. She used to be scared to watch them; now she’s writing one.

Brie isn’t chasing horror because it’s the fastest-growing film category, and she’s not directing her own because women like The Substance’s Coralie Fargeat are attracting awards-season nods. Earning the sort of pop culture credit bestowed upon actresses with long careers and an atmosphere of underappreciation hovering around them isn’t part of her calculus. “The way I choose roles and things like that, it’s very seldom about the industry’s perception or even the arc of my career,” she says. She’s proud of being a genre generalist and trying several jobs on the call sheet. “The older I get, the more I realize that the heart of everything is just trusting yourself. I’m running at the things that excite me.”

A flashing-all caps alert on our scoreboard tells us we have FOUR MINUTES LEFT. We laugh at the lane’s demand to get back on task, but we agree: Her date with Dave can wait if needed; we’ll keep playing until there’s a winner. I’m not surprised when our momentary tie is broken by Brie’s final turn, where she knocks down eight pins like she knows it’s the best ending for my story. She is a writer, after all.

Photographer: Jonny Marlow | Stylist: Sue Choi | Hair Stylist: Clariss Rubenstein | Makeup Artist: Molly Greenwald | Manicurist: Stephanie Stone | Set Design: Isaac Aaron | DP: Sam Miron