What is Alison Brie best known for? Is it Trudy in the 1960s period drama Mad Men? Annie in the campus comedy Community? Ruth in the wrestling dramedy GLOW?
It’s hard to pin her down—Brie likes to mix it up. Genre-wise, she’s done a little of everything, and she’s also stepped behind the camera as a writer and producer on projects like Horse Girl and Somebody I Used to Know. (She starred in both, too. And for the record, that adds two more genres to her résumé: psychological thriller and rom-com.)
Now, she’s trying something scarier with Together. As she explains on the latest episode of “Nice Talk”, horror is a space she’d love to stay in for a while.
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“I like to do it all, I really do,” Brie tells Marie Claire editor-in-chief Nikki Ogunnaike. “I think that it’s what has made for a really fun career is coming out of one project and saying, ‘Oh, good. Now I scratched that itch. What can I do that’s really different from that?'”
Together, which is in theaters now, is certainly different. Brie co-stars in the body horror film alongside her husband, Dave Franco. They play a longtime couple who begin experiencing mysterious physical changes.
“Going into this film, Dave and I were like, this is a risky choice,” Brie says. “There are a lot of things in this movie that, if they weren’t done perfectly, if they weren’t executed perfectly, could be pretty embarrassing.”
The 42-year-old goes on, “Lately, I just love the horror space. I feel like I’m running at it. I would love to do more stuff in horror—the weirder, the better. I just think people who are making horror and genre films now are taking the biggest risks, and they’re writing really unique material and stuff that you haven’t seen before, and so that is very exciting.”
She especially loves how filmmakers like Jordan Peele use horror to “make commentary on larger issues.” In Together, that means examining “relationships and monogamy and codependency.” As Brie puts it, “Horror is such a fun space in which to delve deeper into topics and sort of extrapolate them to their different horrifying degrees.”
Still, while she is in a horror era, comedy remains her comfort zone.
“It’s like the closest to my personality, because I like to joke around,” she says. “I’m a jokester. I’m like a kid on a set. I always just want to be making noise and having fun.”
For more from Brie—including stories from her early career, how she decided to start collaborating with her husband, and her press tour style—check out this week’s installment of “Nice Talk”. The episode is available everywhere you listen to podcasts.
