Alison Brie and Dave Franco Bare All in Rom-Com ‘Somebody I Used to Know’

“There’s literally an ambulance right next to us,” a blurry, but perfectly blown-out Alison Brie explains from the back of a moving vehicle, where she’s seated next to her husband, Dave Franco, between press engagements for their new film. “Going so great already,” she adds with a smile. When I ask if they’d prefer to use Zoom audio, Franco insists, “It’s always nice to see,” shifting the phone as sirens subside.

The couple’s warm if chaotic greeting would have fit right into Somebody I Used to Know, an evolved, somewhat raunchy refresh of the rom-com that debuts on Prime Video today. Brie stars as Ally, a reality TV show producer who, after her show’s abrupt cancellation, reconnects with her former hometown flame Sean (Jay Ellis). Their reunion is complicated by the minor detail that Sean is set to marry the punk-rock-singing Cassidy (Kiersey Clemons) in mere days. 

If that sounds like the plot of My Best Friend’s Wedding, it more or less is. At one point, Cassidy even warns Ally against pulling a Julia Roberts. But this film is concerned less with the one who got away, and more with how a person becomes disconnected from who they once were. 

Franco directs the film from a script he and Brie cowrote in the early days of the pandemic. “Everyone was taking stock of their lives, and it was a major moment of reckoning, sitting around trapped in our homes, thinking, Did I make the right decisions? Am I happy with where I ended up?” Brie tells Vanity Fair from a now relatively quiet car. “We realized that we really are happy and very lucky. Feeling really grateful, we just wanted to create something that was hopeful and put that back out into the world.”

Says Franco, who also cast Brie in his 2020 horror directorial debut The Rental, “Going through this together has brought out our most honest selves, because we just trust and can lean on each other through everything. So it’s really opened me up and made me take risks that I probably wouldn’t have done on my own.” 

After almost six years of marriage, “It’s a nice reminder that the person who’s right for you is the one that’s gonna let you be yourself wholly and completely,” Brie adds. “I certainly feel that way about Dave—even more so after making this movie.” 

Vanity Fair: What did a typical day look like when you were writing Somebody I Used to Know?

Alison Brie: I think we would get up, work out, have breakfast—

Dave Franco: Put on our…

Brie: Matching—

Franco: Palo Alto sweatsuits. 

Brie: Then we usually go to the living room. We both start out on our computers and by an hour in, it’s mostly Dave at the computer typing. I’m up walking around the room. Dave is asking, “How would you say this?” I’m workshopping dialogue, which works nicely since we knew that I would be playing the main character.

Franco: I would essentially ask her to improvise in the moment, and we would then just go back and forth and I would write down her exact words. That’s one of the benefits of also being actors who are trying to write.

The two of you wrote the script early in the pandemic, a period during which Alison’s Netflix series, GLOW, was canceled. In the film, Ally is reeling from similar professional disappointment. Did that real-life event serve as inspiration?

Franco: That’s a good question [laughs]. 

Brie: It’s probably not an accident that Ally’s show is brutally canceled between its third and fourth season. We were already shooting the first two episodes of GLOW season four, which was why we had a special urgency [to finish the script]. We were like, oh, we have these two weeks and then I’m going to go back into production on the show. I guess that just wove its way in.

Franco: But on top of that, there have definitely been moments in our careers where we feel like we’ve been holding on a little too tight because we’re scared that it’ll all go away. You almost forget why you got into it in the first place. And what ends up happening is you stop taking risks. That’s part of the reason I even got into directing. It’s something that I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, but candidly, I was scared. And then after enough time I just said, “Fuck it. This is something I want to do and I have to be true to myself.”