At NME, we like to ask interviewees to name the one album that they return to time and again. It’s a question that can tell us a lot about someone’s taste and inner-workings – though we’ve never had an answer like the one provided by Alison Brie and Dave Franco. We’d naturally imagined that they’d answer individually, but the husband-and-wife acting duo take a rather different approach.
After a little deliberation, with a twinkle in her eye, Brie makes a suggestion: “I was gonna say one that we share…”
“On three…” Franco replies immediately, before they count down in unison: “One, two, three…” Precisely in sync, they shout out the same classic George Harrison album: ‘All Things Must Pass!’”
After the pair break into peals of laughter, Brie explains: “We just love George.” It’s a rare couple whose tastes match so specifically, but Brie and Franco’s united front has become something of an internet reference point of late (hence the viral video of him, erm, drinking water from a towel that she’d slung around her neck after a workout). This is thanks to Together, their gnarly new body-horror with first-time feature director Michael Shanks.
Brie and Franco co-produced the movie and star as Millie and Tim, a couple whose relationship is showing some wear. She’s a teacher, he’s an out-of-work musician who’s immersed in big city life. Unlike Millie, Tim’s such an innate urban dweller that he doesn’t know how to drive. So it’s probably not a great idea for them to move out to the middle of nowhere for her new job, a questionable decision that sets in motion a series of grisly events when they stumble upon a cave signposted by mysterious markings.
After Tim slurps from a seemingly unspoiled pool of water, they find that their bodies begin to fuse together… and then things get really weird. On one level, Together is a straight-up horror indebted to the likes of David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly and, perhaps, the grosser moments in John Carpenter’s own rubbery 1980s remake The Thing. On another, it’s a smart commentary on co-dependency in relationships; although Tim and Millie are obviously not quite on the same page from the start, they can’t seem to imagine life without each other.
“The body-horror connects to these fears of monogamy and toxic co-dependency” – Alison Brie
When the actors read the Shanks-written script, says Franco, “We were initially blown away by these horror set-pieces, which were so innovative and like nothing we had ever seen before. After I read it, I turned to Alison and said, ‘I think this is the one we should do together because I think our real-life relationship could lend itself to the relationship in the film.’ These characters have been together for over a decade and hopefully when you’re watching us on-screen, you can feel some weight from our real relationship.”
“It’s a pretty straightforward metaphor,” adds Brie, “in terms of the body-horror connecting to these fears of monogamy and toxic co-dependency, and an exploration of that. We both loved how it tied into this relationship story and there was excitement, as actors, about getting to do things that we’ve never gotten to do on-screen before.”
Brie and Franco have been together for 13-and-a-half years, having met at New Orleans’ Mardi Gras in 2011. She was out boozing in a restaurant with a mutual friend, who invited Franco to join them. Brie and their pal were already “pretty messed up”, Franco has said, when he arrived on the scene before they headed out to a bar. Brie duly handed him a beer and informed him it was laced with MDMA, which is fitting considering it’s been dubbed ‘the love drug’. They shared the spiked booze and, Brie has explained, spent the night “lip-locked”.
So it’s a typical tale of boy meets girl, girl gets boy high and they go on to make one of the wildest horror movies of 2025. Together is their fifth film collaboration, following the 2020 Franco-directed and co-written horror The Rental and the 2023 rom-com Somebody I Used To Know, which he also directed and co-wrote with Brie (who starred in both movies). Actors, like musicians, have jobs that can entail working away from home for weeks or even months on end. Franco and Brie seem to have found a means of combining their schedules since they both appeared in the 2017 comedy The Little Hours. Is this a life/work hack to spend more time together?
“That’s part of it!” Franco replies enthusiastically. “I think that is why we initially started working together,” adds Brie, “because we had spent so much time apart on jobs. Certainly it’s the reason we wrote Somebody I Used To Know together.”
“We’ve heard from a couple who were fighting all week and they said [watching ‘Together’] actually helped them make up” – Dave Franco
Brie is quick to insist that this doesn’t mean she and Franco are co-dependent in real life, since they work apart far more than they do together, a clarification that points to the uncomfortable questions raised by their new movie. It may be an awkward watch for certain couples, given that it addresses the power imbalance inherent to some relationships, as well as Tim and Millie’s flatlining sex life and the nagging worry that they’re simply sharing their lives out of habit. Are we to take from Together that all relationships are doomed to co-dependency?
“What we love about this movie,” says Brie, “is that every person will take it differently depending on their own feelings about relationships or fears about monogamy. It’s been very interesting, seeing the reactions, because this movie really does hold a mirror up to the audience and reflect back to you whatever your feelings or fears might be, whether you’re in a relationship or not.”
“We’ve heard from a couple who were fighting all week and they said it actually helped them make up,” adds Franco. “And on the flipside, we talked to single people who’ve seen it and said, ‘This is a strong argument for staying single!’”
Franco and Shanks bonded over a love of horror movies (the director admired The Rental, Franco’s directorial debut, which greased the wheels of their relationship). Like most genre nuts, the California-born and bred actor fell in love with scary movies as a youngster. He recalls watching Candyman at a sleepover and immediately looking in the bathroom mirror to see if he could summon the titular ghoul by uttering his name five times, as per the film’s lore.
He was also struck by the original adaptation of Stephen King’s It, feeling particularly haunted by the image of Tim Curry’s Pennywise The Clown rising up from a storm drain: “For the week after I watched it, I would shower with the bathroom door open while wearing a bathing suit because I thought he was gonna come out of the shower drain and get me, and I needed my mum to be there and save me if need be.”
The Exorcist and Poltergeist provided Brie’s childhood cinematic scares – after watching them, she slept on the sofa because the living room somehow felt safer than her bedroom. Although she’s now writing her own spooky movie (which she’s keeping schtum about), she was something of a lapsed horror fan when she met Franco. As a “single woman living alone,” she explains, frights were not at top of her list of priorities. Once they started dating, Franco became her personal horror algorithm: “I’d be like, ‘OK, this one is actually worth you being scared for the next week,’” he recalls.
The key question, as Brie puts it, was whether “the artistry was worth the scare”. When it came to the likes of Hereditary, It Follows and Get Out, the answer was in the affirmative. Together should soon join that pantheon of greats, thanks in part to those aforementioned set-pieces. When an electric saw is introduced early in the tale, you just know – in keeping with the narrative principle Chekhov’s gun, derived from playwright Anton Chekhov’s assertion that a firearm shouldn’t appear in a work of fiction unless it’s going to go off later on – that we’ll be seeing it again.
Shot in just 21 days, Together is also darkly comic due to the actors’ deadpan performances amid outlandish plot points. In one exception to this rule, Franco says he went “full Nick Cage” for the scene where Tim is searching for pills to try to slow down the body-fusing process and bellows: “MUSCLE RELAXANTS!” If that line delivery doesn’t become a meme, they need to shut down the internet, which clearly isn’t fit for purpose anymore.
Much has been made of the fact that one scene required the actors to be stuck together for 10 hours (“That’s a long time to sit on someone’s leg,” Brie quips). The ultimate talking point, though, will probably prove to be the shot of Tim’s penis, which has become affixed to Millie in a manner that we’ll leave to your imagination. Said penis is portrayed via prosthetics and is not, Franco seems keen to explain, actually based on his own. “We’d like it to be a little thicker,” says Brie.
For all the stunts, however, it’s the questions raised by Millie and Tim’s relationship that will stay with you after the credits roll. Brie says she had “workaholic” tendencies when she met Franco, who inspired her to slow down and wait for roles she was passionate about. Did anything in Together jolt them into reassessing other aspects of their relationship, though?
“Oh, gosh,” says Brie, seeming lost for words for the first time in our conversation. “This is so lame to say, but there’s a moment where our characters are looking at each other and saying how much they love each other.” She gives Franco a lingering look. “I related to that.”
‘Together’ is in UK cinemas from August 15