A few years ago, while he was playing a villain in the Kristen Stewart thriller Love Lies Bleeding, Dave Franco was fitted for a facial prosthetic. It was essentially a melange of sinews and smashed teeth, from which a meaty flap of torn-off jaw dangled precariously. “I was horrified by it in the best possible way,” Franco beams. He sensed his wife would love it, too.
Alison Brie, the ebullient star of Mad Men and Glow, very much did. “I was like, ‘Yes, babe! Get it!’”, she says, recounting this lovely tale today alongside Franco in a London hotel suite. “The gorier the better!” This, they quickly assure me, is a mutual quirk for the two of them: Franco is equally as adoring of Brie’s onscreen fatalities. “Alison dies in Scream 4 and that’s like a badge of honour to me. Like, my wife got killed by Ghostface – I’m so proud of her!”
Franco and Brie have been an item for 13 years, and married for eight. Some couples go on date nights to maintain that spark. Others like to watch one another be gruesomely killed in movies. Who are we to judge?
All of this is to say, then, that Franco and Brie are sort of kooky – a Hollywood It-couple drawn to the strange and horrifying. At least now. Years ago, they were mainly known for being funny. Brie rose to fame in a succession of TV roles perfectly attuned to her slightly manic comic zip, notably the cult adult-education comedy Community. Franco, meanwhile, was a consummate scene-stealer, as the jock who wet himself in Superbad, or a slappable frat-house toady in the Bad Neighbours movies. But their respective second acts have involved directing, writing, producing and starring in some of the weirdest indies of the past five years.
Horse Girl and Spin Me Round – oddball comedy dramas about restless, off-kilter women – cemented Brie as one of the most creatively daring actors of her generation (she also co-wrote both). Franco produced the gonzo stripper odyssey Zola and wrote and directed the winning Airbnb-themed slasher The Rental. (Brie got stoned and then bludgeoned to death in that one, naturally.) And now they’re the stars and producers of Together, a suitably disgusting body-horror film about a couple drifting apart who find they are cursed to stick together – literally. After the pair spend a night in a strange cave, their bodies start to fuse, separate flesh becoming one.
“It would have been more difficult to do a movie like this early in our relationship,” Brie concedes, to nods from Franco. “But the fact that we feel so solid made it so much more comfortable, and even doing this press tour.”
Ah, yes, the press tour. You’ve probably seen some of it on your TikTok feed: Brie and Franco “caught” sharing a single french fry; Brie “caught” clipping Franco’s toenails in public; Franco “drinking” from Brie’s sweat-soaked towel. Or any of the many, many clips of Brie and Franco being asked on radio stations about their sex lives or their thoughts on marriage (love it), babies (don’t want ’em) and monogamy (why not?). No famous pair in recent memory – wed or not – have committed so hard to promoting their movie.
“Believe it or not, normally we’re pretty private as a couple,” Brie says, with a laugh. “We don’t generally advertise our relationship. But it goes with the project, and we’re so comfortable together that it hasn’t felt as scary as it could have. Plus it’s for the movie – like, we would never just go on a tour telling everybody a million times how we got engaged, you know?”
“I’m generally a more introverted person,” Franco adds. “Press is not something that comes naturally to me. So divulging so much personal info lately… it’s been a little scary for me. But it’s easier to do it with Alison, who is just so much more outgoing than I am. And there are still things that we hold dear and want to keep private…”
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“That we haven’t divulged,” Brie interrupts. “Even if it might not seem like it.”
Sat side-by-side, the pair do seem evenly matched. Brie, in a dainty tweed jacket and matching skirt, is the assured and confident one, with wide Disney-princess eyes and a chipper, almost musical lilt to her voice. Franco is quieter, squintier, a compact short king with a perpetual grin on his face, muscly Popeye arms peeking out from under a blood-red T-shirt.
Inevitably, the couple finish each other’s sentences. They also live and breathe horror – she loves Cronenberg and The Silence of the Lambs; he loves The Shining, The Fly, and the grisly violence of the original Speak No Evil. A few minutes of our interview today are spent discussing the camp, misunderstood genius of Scream 3 (I will spare you the transcription of this).
Anyway, Together is a funny, touching, gross-out amalgam of everything the pair love about horror. It’s thematically rich, with an easy, relatable central conundrum of a couple who’d rather suffer through an unhappy relationship than have a real conversation. And it’s also amusingly nihilistic, with magnificently effective use of a handsaw and possibly the most wince-inducing shot of a penis since Lars von Trier’s Antichrist.
We can’t officially talk about some of the other things related to Together right now, namely a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by a filmmaker who’s alleged it lifted its premise and some story beats from his own script. But the Together team – including writer/director Michael Shanks and its distributors at Neon – are confident that the suit lacks merit, with Brie saying in a statement this month, “We have an extensive paper trail, and we look forward to showing the court that these claims are frivolous.”
For both Franco and Brie, the film offered a chance to push their bodies to physical extremes. One scene sees Franco thrash around in a shower stall and slam repeatedly into its walls. “I was getting injured on a daily basis, but I was still asking for more,” he laughs. “All the producers were being very responsible and saying, like, ‘Dave, we have a stunt double’ – but I just wanted to dive in.”
Understandably, the pair didn’t use an intimacy coordinator for their nude scenes together, but I’m curious to know whether they felt the need for one during the film’s more violent scenes. Conversations are now regularly had about ensuring actors feel safe while filming sexually charged moments, but what about – as in Together – scenes of self-harm or physical mutilation?
“I think directing actors in any scene is going to be a negotiation around what people feel comfortable with, and making sure that everyone is on the same page,” Franco says. “And also having those conversations early on, so it’s not this chaotic back-and-forth on set.”
“I always feel like I want to be having fun on set, and for the people around me to be having fun, even if it’s a violent movie,” Brie adds. She remembers experiencing a real crash course in horror-movie production on the set of Scream 4, in which she played the doomed book publicist of franchise hero Sidney Prescott.
Wes Craven, a famously gentle director considering the grisliness of his work, took Brie aside before they shot her death scene. “He said, ‘Just have fun and don’t take this moment too seriously. When he stabs you, you can just be like, bleurgh –’”. She sticks her tongue out, pained if a little comic, mimicking Craven. “He was being silly and giving me permission to be silly.” He then filmed her being gutted and thrown off the roof of a parking garage, as you do.
Coincidentally, Brie and Franco first encountered each other during an audition for Scream 4 in 2010 (he didn’t get a part in it), but officially met in 2011 at Mardi Gras in New Orleans, having been introduced by mutual friends. At that point, Brie was pulling double duty on both Mad Men and Community – she played Vincent Kartheiser’s deceptively steely wife Trudy on the former, and hopped-up overachiever Annie on the latter.
Franco, meanwhile, was struggling to find a place for himself in acting. The little brother of the then-ubiquitous James Franco, he’d had a whiff of the Frank Stallones or Dedee Pfeiffers when he’d materialised two years earlier – seemingly out of nowhere – in the final season of the medical sitcom Scrubs. Almost the entirety of the show’s regular cast had left the season before, with Franco among the unknowns asked to replace them.
“They ended [the previous season] in the most perfect way, and the final scene is literally all of the actors crying and hugging each other and saying goodbye,” Franco remembers. “The series was over, and then they’re like, ‘We’re actually doing another season’, and it’s with… me.” He laughs. “So we were really having to dig ourselves out of a hole before we even started.” It was his first experience of the harsher realities of celebrity. “It was a great experience in lots of ways, and I’m really proud of some of the stuff I did in that season – even if other people are not.”
Lots of work followed – Now You See Me, If Beale Street Could Talk, and a scene-stealing turn as a high-school drug dealer facing off against Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill in 21 Jump Street – but also lots that felt out of his control. “You can go on 50 auditions and not get a single role, and then you get in your head about it and start saying, ‘I’m terrible.’ So for me, that’s when I started taking writing really seriously.”
Brie, meanwhile, came to writing and directing in a moment of enormous professional success that, oddly, didn’t feel as satisfying as she’d assumed it would. Glow, in which she played a female pro wrestler in the Eighties, was a hit for Netflix and landed her a Golden Globe nomination, but Brie didn’t sense any sort of wider sea change when it came to the roles she was being offered.
“I thought the recognition I was getting from Glow would unlock all these doors that hadn’t been open to me before, and that just was not the case at all,” she remembers. “I thought I was doing a lot of different roles at that point, but it was like [the industry] had already put me in a box.”
That box was created years earlier, she says, by Mad Men and Community. “To me, those characters I played were so different,” she explains. “I was playing a Sixties housewife – a Lady Macbeth of sorts – on a very nuanced dramatic series, and then playing a kind of psychotically type-A kid at a community college with a group of goofballs. But I think what the broader entertainment industry saw was two type-A, put-together women who could be a little uptight, and it became its own kind of character.”
So she began writing, partly inspired by seeing Franco write, too. At this point in the conversation, Brie and Franco turn to each other and seem to get a little lost in one another. Brie talks about how much she adores hearing stories about Franco making short films with his friends in high school. Franco talks about how inspired he is by watching Brie navigate the world. Brie says she loves how Franco seems to instinctively know which projects she should say yes or no to.
“We just get each other,” she says. “We’ve unwrapped these other artistic parts of each other by being together, and we’re excited when one of us gets a really great job, even if that means sometimes spending months apart from one another.”
“And then when we get to work together, we really are a strong team,” Franco says. “I feel like when I have her by my side, I’m invincible.”
Brie smiles. Franco smiles. Throw in some fake blood and it could be their Christmas card.
‘Together’ is in cinemas
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