In the gory body horror movie Together, Alison Brie and Dave Franco play characters who get so close that they literally become stuck together. Their lips fuse when they’re kissing. When they’re asleep, Brie’s hair gets sucked into Franco’s mouth. When they leave each other’s side, their bodies fly across the room to follow one another. At the end of the film’s trailer, Brie grabs a saw to address the inconvenient reality that their limbs are now conjoined.
In real life, they’re a package deal but in a less visceral way. Together writer-director Michael Shanks approached Franco with the script, and the actor became fixated on the idea of channeling his real-life relationship with his wife, Brie.
“We went back to [Shanks] and said, ‘All right, you either have both of us or none of us,’” Franco tells Yahoo with a laugh.
Seated next to each other on a Zoom call, Brie and Franco bypass the common relationship quirk of finishing each other’s thoughts, instead watching the other talk and affirming what the other says afterward. They act more like friends who recently started dating than a married couple that’s been together for 13.5 years.
That familiarity and fondness lend to the chemistry they’ve displayed in interviews, including while promoting Together. They’ve filmed videos showing gratuitous affection in public, sharing a single sweatshirt while attending a baseball game and being generally grossly obsessed with each other.
Though they first met and began dating in 2011, they didn’t start working together until 2017’s biographical comedy The Disaster Artist, in which they also played a couple. Brie tells Yahoo she was nervous about what Franco might be like on set.
“Every actor has a different way of working. Some people are very method. So I was sort of like, ‘Is the Dave I know going to be the Dave that’s on set?’” she says. “Because I certainly feel like I’m the same on and off set.”
She says her “really small role” was a “great ripping off of the Band-Aid” for future collaborations.
“Small but pivotal,” Franco adds.
Then came 2017’s convent comedy The Little Hours, in which Brie played a nun, and Franco an alluring servant. If The Disaster Artist was like ripping a Band-Aid off, this one was like sawing a limb off.
“[I] watched Dave make out and have sex scenes with every other woman in the film,” Brie laughs.
“That’s true,” Franco says.
Brie was invited to set the day that Franco shot a threesome scene with Aubrey Plaza and Jemima Kirke, but she politely declined.
“I can confidently say I did not come,” Brie smirks. “But actually that turned out to be one of my favorite scenes in the movie.”
Alison Brie and Dave Franco in Together. (Neon/Courtesy of Everett Collection)
That started a hot streak of collaborations. Brie was in Franco’s directorial debut, the 2020 horror movie The Rental, and they cowrote the 2023 romantic comedy Somebody I Used to Know, which Franco also directed.
“Gosh, I think that really cracked it wide open. I love being on set with Dave as a director. He is such a great leader on set in every way. An amazing attitude. Such passion. So supportive of everyone in the cast and crew. Letting everyone shine,” Brie says. “I truly think I fell more in love with Dave watching him direct. And then [costarring in Together] was the next step.”
Though Brie fell harder for Franco while watching him helm a production, it was sharing physically and emotionally draining scenes in Together that will be “difficult to top” in their relationship, Franco says.
In the movie, the pair play a codependent couple struggling to support each other and maintain their own identities despite their forced closeness after a move separates them from their friends and family. Brie and Franco swear that though their relationship influenced the movie, they’re not actually like their characters in real life.
“These probably couldn’t be further from who we really are,” Franco says. “My [character, Tim], he’s not supportive of his partner. He’s kind of a bummer.”
“But Dave is a really supportive person and a really fun hang,” Brie interjects.
“And a very supportive partner,” Franco says. Brie repeats the sentiment, adding that the onscreen couple is “clearly in a bit of a funk and not good at communicating,” slipping into routines and losing their individuality.
In their real lives, she’s proud of how they’ve been “able to retain a good amount of independence.”
Brie as Millie in Together. (Neon/Courtesy of Everett Collection)
“We have our own lives. We have our own friends. We also love doing stuff together,” Brie says, and it shows.
“The final thing I should mention is that the characters in the film have a very strained sexual relationship, and we don’t,” Franco says with a smile. “We’ve been together 13 and a half years. I feel like we’re doing OK.”
The couple wasn’t shy about discussing just how all-consuming it was to make this movie together, though it wasn’t due to clashes in personality. They have clear boundaries, staying focused and professional while on set, but they’re always pushing each other from a place of deep admiration.
“The way that we had to fight our own bodies in this movie … the tension always had to live in our bodies. We would get sore in the weirdest places,” Franco says.
“It was exhausting,” Brie says of filming Together, adding that Franco’s body was covered in bruises. It was all worth it, though — both to be together and to challenge themselves as artists.
“It’s kind of fun to push yourself to the ultimate limits. No scream is too loud. It kind of felt very freeing,” Brie says.
Franco as Tim in Together. (Neon/Courtesy of Everett Collection)
Of course, Brie and Franco can’t talk about their time filming without gushing about each other. Amid the stunts, the screaming and the body horror, Franco says, Brie is “just one of the best actresses working, and so she makes my job very easy in that sense, where it’s just easy and fun to play off of her.”
“We just have each other as emotional support too. This can be a very vulnerable job sometimes. It can be very emotionally taxing. The fact that we can lean on each other is invaluable,” he continues.
The key to working so well together is not something they can explicitly define. They just know each other intimately enough that they can communicate nonverbally. There’s never a moment when one is being too silly or too serious. The only exception, Brie says, is when they’re writing together — a more personal experience without tons of coworkers.
“I have rules Dave immediately bends,” Brie laughs.
“It’s so good that I have her to put the brakes on and make sure that our entire relationship doesn’t become work-centric,” Franco says.
After listening to them prove their chemistry for several minutes, I admitted I was jealous that my husband wasn’t an actor, so we’d never have a working relationship like this. Brie joked that I should dump him.
I like him too much to do that, but I am going to take him to see Together. No matter how couples interpret the movie, Brie hopes they emerge on the same page.
“We’ve also heard from some single people that this movie was an argument for staying single,” she says. The scenes of traumatizing body horror brought about by relationship struggles might deter some from finding their person, but the real-life love between the actors makes the opposite case.