Alison Brie had one of the luckiest big breaks in the history of television. Before the age of 30, she managed to simultaneously co-star on TV’s most celebrated drama (Mad Men) and most obsessed-over comedy (Community). In the seven years since those two shows ended their iconic runs, she has risen to the top of the call sheet in her beloved Netflix series GLOW, and gone toe to toe with both comedy stars like Will Ferrell and acting legends like Meryl Streep on the big screen.
In this week’s episode of The Last Laugh podcast, Brie talks about making the move to indie film screenwriting with Netflix’s Horse Girl and now her Italy-set comedy Spin Me Round. She also addresses whether fans can expect to see Chevy Chase in the eventual Community movie, explains why she felt the need to apologize for her voice work on Bojack Horseman, and a lot more.
Spin Me Round marks Brie’s fourth collaboration with writer-director Jeff Baena, whom she first met on the set of Community. It was the final season of that show’s run, and he was there to ask her to play a small part in his 2016 film Joshy. From there, she took on one of the lead roles in his fully improvised movie The Little Hours, also set in Italy. “That felt so exciting because it was so unlike anything I had seen before,” she recalls. “A raunchy sex comedy about 14th century nuns is not something that I hear about every day.
“When we were making it, I had no idea how it was going to turn out, and I really love the final product so much that I think it really solidified my trust for Jeff and the way that he works,” Brie continues. So when she decided she wanted to start writing movies herself, she immediately thought he would be the perfect partner. She brought him the idea for their 2020 Netflix psychological drama Horse Girl and, in turn, he came to her with the concept for the film that ultimately became Spin Me Round.
In the new film, which is available to stream now on AMC+, Brie plays Amber, the manager of a restaurant franchise not-so-loosely based on Olive Garden. When Amber takes a trip to Italy, what she imagines will be a dream vacation ends up turning into a nightmare when she learns some uncomfortable truths about the company’s owner, Nick (Alessandro Nivola), and his mysterious assistant Kat, played by Baena’s wife, Aubrey Plaza.
Next up, Brie will star in a romantic comedy called Somebody I Used to Know that she co-wrote with her husband, Dave Franco, who will also direct. That film reunites Brie with her old friend Danny Pudi, aka Abed on Community.
“It’s the first time that Danny and I have acted together since Community,” she says. “And it was so fun to be back on set. Immediately our antics from the past were right in the forefront, and a lot of them made it on screen. I think that Community fans will be happy to see our characters together in that.”
Below is an edited excerpt from our conversation. You can listen to the whole thing by subscribing to The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts, and be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Tuesday.
So for anyone who hasn’t seen the movie yet, you play the manager of an Olive Garden-style restaurant that’s not called Olive Garden—
I can neither confirm nor deny. You said it, not me.
Tuscan Grove. And you get this opportunity to go to Italy, and it’s supposed to be this great opportunity to learn about Italian culture. But that’s not actually what ends up happening. And then there’s the character of Nick, the owner of the franchise, and you get the opportunity to see other parts of Italy through him. So can you talk about the idea behind this character? Because I know you’ve mentioned that he was partly inspired by men you’ve encountered over the course of your career.
Well, in Jeff’s original outline, Nick was this character that kind of loomed large over everything. It was like this real driving force in terms of the things that happen to Amber once she’s there. And it should be said that all of the [Jeffrey] Epstein stuff was going down when we were writing.
That was on your mind?
Yes, and it wasn’t part of it, obviously, when Jeff originally conceived the idea five years prior or something. But by the time we were writing it, yes. We actually even had some dialogue that we ended up pulling out where we were name-checking Epstein and Ghislaine [Maxwell], but people thought that it would maybe cause, like, trauma for people watching it.
You needed a trigger warning?
Exactly. And because we wanted to keep the tone fairly comedic throughout the whole movie, we were like, oh God, we would never want to have that effect on anybody watching. A lot of my process with Jeff when we’re writing is sharing stories and experiences. So some of it just has to do with adding specificity to the scenes and to their conversations. There’s a moment where Nick is talking to Amber in detail about something, but she kind of zones out and doesn’t realize what he’s talking about, which was my contribution based on an experience on a date that I was on with a man once. Honestly, to this day I’m still not sure if it was a date. And it went on for way too long, and at one point we were in his car driving and I just was looking out the window kind of chilling out, and he was droning on, and I was just agreeing. And then eventually I kind of tuned back in and realized that he was talking about tantric sex, and it was sort of like, what have I agreed to in this moment?
So I don’t want to totally spoil the end of the movie for people, but were there alternative endings that you considered before arriving at the massive orgy scene that you decided on?
No, it was always an orgy. If anything, there were earlier drafts that were much more graphic involving our main characters. It’s so funny writing something in a vacuum, and the stuff that we would find really funny. And then as you go to send a script out to people to ask them to do it with you, you go, “Maybe we should take out the part where that character’s face is in that guy’s butthole.”
I mean Italy’s great, but it’s not that great.
Yeah, it was sort of like, let’s pull it back a little. But there were some variations on it for sure. The scene that we actually rewrote the most was the very final scene between Amber and Nick at the restaurant. I think our idea was always for Amber to land on her two feet. The main thing that we were both excited about was the idea of somebody going on a trip like this, thinking it’s going to change their life, and then coming home and nothing has changed at all. But then we wanted to color in shades of like, Amber has grown a little as a person, she has learned to assert herself in some small ways. And that’s a step in a good direction for her. But it was just sort of navigating how she would handle seeing Nick, how that kind of rejection might go. We also toyed with the idea of [Aubrey Plaza’s character] Kat being involved in some way in the ending.
As we were writing this, too, Happiest Season came out, and watching the fan reaction to Aubrey and that movie and how much they wanted her character to end up with Kristen Stewart’s character, we were like, “OK, so that’s probably going to happen again here, should we change it?” And we went down that road a little, and ultimately what we kept coming back to is, that’s not what this story is about. The whole point of this movie is actually that Amber isn’t supposed to find love. She’s more just supposed to take something away on her own as a human being and be a stronger person in the end. And also, I think speaking of the Epstein-Ghislaine part of it, we had trouble reconciling Kat’s behavior in the movie. Aubrey is very magnetic to watch, but that character has been complicit in bad behavior for a long time.
Yeah, she was totally enabling all of his bad behavior, so for you to end up with her wouldn’t seem great either.
It was us trying to decide, where does the movie stand on Nick’s behavior? We don’t want to be complicit. Ultimately, Amber and Kat are not meant to be together forever. She’s the kind of person that you meet on a vacation, and they have a big impact on your life, and you never see them again.
So I want to focus a lot of this conversation on your comedy work, but I feel like we do have to at least touch on Mad Men, which was your first big break in the drama world. And that came very early in your career, right? I mean, you really hadn’t done much before you got that role. So how did that happen?
Yeah, I was 24 when I started working on the show. So I was a couple of years out of college and just auditioning for everything, just in the grind of going to acting classes and having a new agent. I had shot an episode of Hannah Montana. I had shot a B horror movie called Born. Do not recommend. Actually, it’s probably a pretty fun watch, but… woof. And then I got the opportunity to audition for Mad Men. I think it was the fourth episode of the first season, so the show had already been picked up, but it did feel very mysterious because it was for AMC. It was the first scripted content for AMC, so at that point I was just like, it’s for that network that shows old movies? But the material was so good immediately. I got called back a couple of times, and then I didn’t hear back and I was really devastated. And then I got a call that I got it. Matt Weiner told me later that the director of the episode did not want to cast me. But I think they just had a lot of trouble casting the part, which goes along with most of the roles that I’ve gotten in my life. I would say the same about Community. They had a lot of trouble casting the role and I came in at the last second.
I wonder what that says about your auditioning style.
Luck! It’s called luck, I think. So when I signed on to do that, it was always just a possible recurring guest star role.
You didn’t know how much you’d be coming back, if at all.
Exactly, and it was a big deal that before I was even done shooting my first episode, they asked me to come back for the very next episode, so I felt really good about that. And then for the subsequent seven and a half years, Mad Men was like my boyfriend that I was pining for. I was waiting by the phone all the time. I would take some other, like, independent horror movie and be right about to shoot it, and then Mad Men would call and I’d be like, “Cancel the horror movie!” It was very exciting, but as I said, it was hard to know at first that it was even going to be anything. It felt like a really good job, especially coming out of the theater school. The material was so good and so nuanced.
And even though you weren’t a series regular on the show, you got to really grow and change as that character over many years, through the cultural changes of the time. And I feel like by the end, Trudy is really standing up to Pete.
Definitely. The writing on Mad Men was so good, and I do think exactly what you’re saying is why it was such a good show, because every character, even if someone appeared in one episode, they had a backstory. No character was just one-dimensional. And Trudy is a great example of that. She really grew and changed. She got to come into her own power and break some of the norms of that time period. And I feel like, to this day, there are clips or scenes that I have even forgotten about that people will send me on Instagram and I’m like, Trudy was a badass.
And then, of course, the fact that you were a recurring guest star meant that you could do things like go be on Community as a regular, which is very rare to have two shows like that going on at the same time, that really couldn’t be more different in a lot of ways. How do you feel like those two experiences compared? Because you would be doing one in the morning and one in the afternoon sometimes, running back and forth. Did it feel like two totally different worlds?
Yes, and I would often say to people, you wouldn’t recognize me on the other set. Being a regular on one show meant that I was much more comfortable on that set, because it’s not like every time I’m here I’m having to prove myself and hoping that they’ll bring me back for another episode. On the set of Mad Men I was very quiet, very focused. It was this dramatic show, and also because of the nature of Trudy’s storyline most of the time, it was just me and Vincent Kartheiser. Every so often I’d be in a big party scene or something like that, but doing Mad Men felt like doing Checkhov or something. I was over on the quiet set with a single actor and we were digging in.
And the Community set was like a children’s playground. It was an explosion of noises and sounds and we would just be talking and doing bits right up until “action” and then go into the scene. Even between takes, we shot such long hours over there, and just to entertain ourselves we were always making silly videos. And as that series went on, it really felt like we all developed our own language. I always kind of felt for guest stars who came in, because we would try to be very warm and inclusive, but at the same time the jokes that we were making were based on a bit that got cut from an episode in season two. And I did go back and watch a lot of the Community episodes during 2020 because it went up on Netflix and it was just so at the forefront of my consciousness again. And I just was laughing because when I watch it I’m remembering the experiences and the jokes that we were making behind the scenes. And the jokes in my mind are an alt line that never even made it into the episode. So the fan experience of the show is quite different from our experience of making and watching it. But yeah, we were like little kids. It was really fun.
So you recently made some news by hinting that the Community movie is in the works, that wheels are turning. And then Dan Harmon kind of confirmed it, and everyone’s very excited.
Dan said a lot more than me, and I was relieved.
Were there things that he said that you were holding back?
Yeah…
Because you don’t want to get in trouble?
Yeah, I don’t want to get in trouble, exactly.
I think as more time goes by, expectations grow for the whole “six seasons and a movie” thing. And what the movie has to be seems like it must get more and more nerve-wracking in terms of what fans are demanding.
Yeah, I can imagine, but not for me, because I will have nothing to do with the writing of the movie. So good luck, Dan! I’m sort of like, let’s do fan service. Don’t try something that’s so crazy. Let’s get us back to Greendale. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel.
One thing that I’m curious about is whether you think Chevy Chase will be part of the movie, given how much everyone has spoken out about how difficult that working relationship was.
Sure, I really don’t know. I don’t really know. But, I mean, I would venture… You know what? I’m not going to venture something, I just don’t know.
I mean, you’ve been pretty open about that, and Joel [McHale] has as well. About the challenges there, just in terms of the age gap, and—maybe like those guest stars—not really understanding what was going on all the time.
Yeah, I do think there was a disconnect with what Chevy knew as comedy when he was making the majority of his work and sort of not being able to understand the way comedy was changing and had changed. But for the most part, I really got along well with Chevy. I’m not trying to be a Chevy apologist, but I will say that for the most part we had a lot of fun.
I feel like Donald Glover will also be a big question mark for the movie, because he left the show early and now he’s gone on to do so many huge things that I wonder if he would be back as well. I’m sure people would love to see him return to that character, even if it’s a little bit hard to imagine at this point.
He’s a busy guy. Yeah, I mean, I hope so. I would love that. And I also feel like everyone would be so amenable to whatever we had to do. Like, let’s carve out a single day, green screen, could we send someone to wherever Donald is in the world and just get a shot of his face saying something?
Well, it’s exciting that it seems like it’s actually going to happen. I hope it’s going to happen.
The wheels are turning. With Community stuff, I’m still just like, I feel very optimistic, but also, I’ll believe it when I see it.
Listen to the episode now and subscribe to ‘The Last Laugh’ on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts, and be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Tuesday.
