Yahoo Finance Alison Brie on Why She Loves Streaking: 'It's So Fun and It Really Makes Me Laugh'
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Alison Brie has a scene in her new romantic comedy, Somebody I Used to Know, in which her character runs around nude on a golf course. Putting it in the movie was her idea, she says in the new issue of PEOPLE.
Brie, who co-wrote the film with husband Dave Franco, based the moment on her own love of streaking. "I certainly had a penchant for it in my college years," says the L.A. native, who studied theater at the California Institute of the Arts.
"At CalArts I was a big streaker. And even in my adult life, I find it to be quite hilarious. I'm a very comfortable naked person," she continues. "I love streaking. It's so fun. It really makes me laugh. I always think it makes other people laugh. It's just one of my favorite things."
Franco doesn't get quite the same kick out of it. "I've spent years talking Dave into accepting my comfort with nudity," she explains. "He's comfortable with me being nude at our home, but in public, he's more averse to it."
The last time she indulged? "There might have been some streaking in the GLOW years," says Brie, referring to her 2017-19 Netflix comedy about a female wrestling league.
In Somebody I Used to Know, Brie plays Allie, a big-city reality TV show producer who returns to her hometown in Washington where she runs into her ex-boyfriend Sean (Insecure's Jay Ellis). As she begins to feel a spark again, she learns he's engaged to be married to free-spirited Cassidy (Kiersey Clemons).
Though that premise may sound awfully familiar, this is no retread of wholesome Hallmark fare. There's adult humor, pot-smoking, and of course, that streaking scene. "We have fun playing with rom-com tropes and try to take them someplace unexpected," explains Brie.
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And while the character of Ally is certainly not a carbon copy of Brie, "a big part of the foundation of this story was drawing from aspects of our real lives in oblique ways: our personalities, our sense of humor," she says. "And also in specific ways, like the fact that I did to streak when I was younger and I'm always trying to tap back into that spirit that I had in college, that freedom."
She and Franco were inspired by a pre-pandemic trip home to visit her husband's family in his native Palo Alto, California. "That was when we birthed the idea. We sort of just tossed around ideas about being back in your hometown and also about the one that got away and people's amnesia when it comes to relationships and breakups and why those things happen," she says.
Then when the pandemic hit a few months later, they got to work. "We really hunkered down in the first two weeks," she says. They knocked out a draft, but it was, Brie admits "s—y."
After many months, several rewrites and plenty of feedback from friends ("with everybody quarantining, they didn't have excuses why they couldn't read it," says Brie) the couple perfected the delightfully cheeky movie.
The couple are already in the middle of writing their next project together. Asked for more details, Brie is coy, only saying that it's not a rom-com. "I'm really fulfilled by the work that I'm doing," she says. "I'm really happy in my marriage. This is a great moment in my life."
Somebody I Used to Know launches globally on Prime Feb. 10.
For more on Alison Brie, pick up the new issue of PEOPLE.
