Somebody I Used to Know

2023 - 2 - 10

Alison Brie

Post cover — Image courtesy of "The A.V. Club"

Alison Brie knew we were going to ask about the Community movie (The A.V. Club)

Speaking with The A.V. Club, Alison Brie breaks down her new film Somebody I Used To Know and offers an update on the Community movie.

This is the most hopeful any of us have been in a long time.” “Dave would let the cameras roll while Danny and I were messing around, doing bits, and a lot of those would make it into the movie.” [11% OffAll-New Fire TV Cube](https://www.amazon.com/All-new-fire-tv-cube-4k-streaming-device/dp/B09BZZ3MM7?asc_campaign=InlineMobile&asc_refurl=https://www.avclub.com/alison-brie-somebody-i-used-to-know-community-movie-1850097421&asc_source=&tag=kinjaavclubpromo-20) In that meantime, Brie is happy to have made her contribution to the rom-com renaissance. “I say this with a hint of [sighs] I don’t trust it! I’m not a skeptic, I do believe that the Community movie will get made. Club on Wednesday, before dubbing the film a “rom-com, with a heavy dose of dram.” Brie makes it clear that while a specific scene involving her cat is based on a true story, very little of the film is pulled from their real lives. What’s the plan?’ And he was kind of just bouncing around. I saw Joel and Danny last week and I was like, ‘Joooooel, where’s the script? I think of it more as an adult coming-of-age story,” Alison Brie said during a conversation with The A.V. “Once you get into them, ultimately, they are relationship dramas, and then it’s a matter of peppering how much comedy you want.” “We call it a rom-com, but that’s not totally how I would describe the movie.

Alison Brie and Dave Franco Bare All in Rom-Com 'Somebody I ... (Vanity Fair)

The real-life couple and creative partners speak to VF about reimagining My Best Friend's Wedding and how GLOW's cancellation inspired a crucial plot point.

This is something I want to do and I have to be true to myself.” We were like, oh, we have these two weeks and then I’m going to go back into production on the show. Feeling really grateful, we just wanted to create something that was hopeful and put that back out into the world.” That’s one of the benefits of also being actors who are trying to write. 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. 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.

Alison Brie and Dave Franco explain how their marriage fueled <em ... (EW.com)

The new film tells the story of a woman returning to her hometown after a career setback, only to find that her high school sweetheart is about to marry ...

Brie adds, "A lot of that also had to do with writing it during the pandemic when everybody was going through this monumental situation and taking stock of our lives: Are we happy with where we've ended up? "Our intention from the beginning was to not have any villains in the movie," Franco says. Brie also co-wrote the film with Franco, and she says their collaboration started as a way to spend more time together. "We didn't know when we would actually have time to sit down and write it, and then, a few months later, the world ended," Franco tells EW. The result of that prolonged creative process was their new relationship drama Somebody I Used to Know, which starts streaming on Amazon Prime Video on Friday. [Alison Brie](https://ew.com/person/alison-brie/) and [Dave Franco](https://ew.com/person/dave-franco/) had an idea for a movie.

Somebody I Used to Know movie review (2023) | Roger Ebert (Roger Ebert)

We know what the Hallmark Movie Channel version of this story would be. But Brie and her co-screenwriter, husband, and director Dave Franco like to subvert ...

[Amy Sedaris](/cast-and-crew/amy-sedaris), Brie's "Community" co-star [Danny Pudi](/cast-and-crew/danny-pudi) as Sean's best friend, and [Haley Joel Osment](/cast-and-crew/haley-joel-osment) as Sean's immature brother. [JoJo](/cast-and-crew/jojo) (a wonderfully warm-hearted [Olga Merediz](/cast-and-crew/olga-merediz)), asks Ally to film the wedding, and Ally considers this a way to remind Sean that she's a better match for him. Although Cassidy and Sean have known each other only six months, she's abandoning her successful career in the city as a punk rock singer (they opened for Sleater-Kinney) to live with him. [Sam Richardson](/cast-and-crew/sam-richardson) and [Zoe Chao](/cast-and-crew/zoe-chao) (also of this week's "Your Place or Mine"), cancel the series. Now, after three years as showrunner of a trashy reality show that crosses " [Survivor](/reviews/survivor-2015)," "The Great British Baking Show," and "Love Island," she tells herself that "it's just like making a documentary, except that people watch it." [Alison Brie](/cast-and-crew/alison-brie)) left her boyfriend and their small, rural hometown to make documentaries in Los Angeles.

'Somebody I Used to Know' Is a Hollow Imitation of a Movie We ... (Exclaim!)

Instead, there's Ally (Alison Brie), an aspiring documentarian who is stuck producing reality television. And forget about the Wall Street bro (or sports exec) ...

Franco does try to save the film from comparison, though, by going meta and name-dropping My Best Friend's Wedding in the film. While both are the "villain" of the film, Ally being an uninvited guest and absent for so many years makes her actions feel particularly cruel and juvenile — which is fine until we're asked to have some sympathy for her at the end. (Cameron Diaz's Kimmy had a similar reckoning with Dermot Mulroney's Michael, although she very quickly backtracked.) It's a valiant effort with some payoff in the end, but it's ultimately a cursory offering that does little to add anything compelling to the formulaic narrative. And forget about the Wall Street bro (or sports exec) — Sean ( [Jay Ellis](https://exclaim.ca/artists/jay_ellis)) is a... And those comparisons aren't kind to Somebody I Used to Know. [Dave Franco](https://exclaim.ca/artists/dave_franco)'s second directorial effort, he tackles the classic rom-com with a 2020s spin.

Alison Brie Talks 'Somebody I Used to Know,' Rediscovering Her ... (Collider.com)

Once there, her first love Sean (Jay Ellis), who's preparing to marry his fiancé Cassidy (Kiersey Clemons), leads her to question what she really wants and what ...

For a long time, I think it was just a great joke. It was a great way for a stranger to yell something at me, from across the street. BRIE: It was immediately that song, but then there was a brief period where we thought we might not be able to use that song, so we were frantic and going, “Should it be Smash Mouth? Should it be Alanis Morissette?” It’s such a tall order when you’re like, “What’s a song that holds all this nostalgia from my era of being a teenager, but also has to have such a hook that people know, that when you’re doing it with other lyrics, they still know what it is?” That was really tricky. That’s how it found its way into the movie, and that was such a fun scene to shoot. It surprised me, how exactly the same it felt, and it also didn’t surprise me, at all. It’s so awesome that you got to do a song in this, to the tune of “Semi-Charmed Life,” by Third Eye Blind. I was like, “I know I’m very comfortable with it, but are you cool?” I don’t wanna give anything away, but there’s another scene in the movie that involves some nudity, and in that scene, with that actress, I was totally nude, even during all of my off camera lines, just in solidarity. And then, when I worked on GLOW, working around all of these incredible women, and really having an intentionality to the nudity, and having so many conversations around it, and doing a lot of non-sexual nudity, I tapped back into who I really was. As the veteran nudist, in my real life, and also as a writer and producer on this, part of me definitely wanted to make sure that Kiersey [Clemons] was comfortable. And as soon as we tapped into the Cassidy character being so grounded and real, we couldn’t help but draw parallels between that and where Ally wanted to be. I love the poster for this movie.