Alison Brie gets mistaken for herself all the time. “You know what people mostly ask me?” she says, leaning over at the West Hollywood chop shop where we’re getting our nails done, resting her hand on my thigh the way a girlfriend does. “They ask me ‘Do people ever tell you you look just like Alison Brie?'”
“So after the fifth person said that to me, I asked my sister, ‘Do you think I need to wear makeup when I’m in public?'” She said no, but I’m still concerned: It’s like I’m the busted version of myself in real life.”
Sitting next to the 32-year-old Brie in real life, she doesn’t look like a busted version of herself. She just looks like the version of herself that just came from the gym, threw on a tank top and her favorite pair of Madewell overalls (“I wear them all the time, but only women give me compliments”), kept her hair in her workout ponytail, and came to get her nails done. And even if people tell her she “looks like that woman from Mad Men,” it’s the voice that should get her recognized: melodious, cheery, equal parts preschool teacher and drama kid. It’s helped make her a go-to voice actor — and what IMDb has down for her under “distinctive trait.”
At the nail salon, though, she’s just “Alison, reservation for two?” The women who run the shop clearly like her — this is her go-to spot — but it’s unclear whether they know that she’s also an actress. She has a big smile for everyone and asks their opinion on colors; she gamely pets the small yip-yip dog that’s hogging the couch in the waiting area.It’s a classic nail salon, which is to say that the color palette is still straight out of a 1992 episode of 90210, with the soft drone of soap operas competing with Maury in the background.
Today, Brie’s chosen nude-colored toenails, and a slightly pinker shade of nude for her fingernails, because “they’ll go with everything” for the whirlwind of publicity that will accompany the release of Sleeping With Other People. It’s the film she hopes will prove what years of posing in various states of undress for lad mags could not: that she’s neither Annie Edison, the nervous, type-A community college student she played on Community, nor Trudy, the strident, ‘60s-era wife of Pete Campbell on Mad Men.
She’s Alison Brie, “and maybe I’m ready, you know, to be a woman — a woman who graduates from community college. A woman who fucks.”
Photographed in Glendale, CA on August 25, 2015 for BuzzFeed News.
Photographs by Joyce Lee for BuzzFeed News; Styling by Cristina Ehrlich for TheOnly.Agency; Hair by David Gardner for Moroccanoil at GRID Agency; Makeup by Jenn Streicher at Forward Artists
Sleeping With Other People is far from Brie’s first movie. Take a look at her filmography and you’ll see a solid dozen films, some of them straight to VOD and others, like Get a Job, co-starring Anna Kendrick, Bryan Cranston, and Miles Teller, that, due to studio wrangling, may never be released. But there’s also mainstream fare: Brie played the kooky sister in The Five-Year Engagement, the put-together sister in Save the Date, the preposterously manipulative wife in Get Hard. She died early in Scream 4; she’s the voice of Unikitty in The Lego Movie.
But Sleeping— in which she plays a serial cheater opposite Jason Sudeikis’s serial womanizer — is her first starring role in a big-league movie. Not a blockbuster movie, not a prestige indie, but a produced-by-Will Ferrell sort of movie. The sort of movie that might not make hundreds of millions at the box office, but will certainly make a few handfuls of millions and get a ton of people to watch it on demand.
Brie and her engagement ring attend the premiere of Sleeping With Other People on Sept. 9 in Hollywood.
Jason Laveris / FilmMagic
But the size of the movie matters less than the type of character Brie gets to play. Specifically: an adult character with adult sex and relationship issues. There’s a guy (Adam Scott) who she met in college, whom she always loved but who never quite liked her enough in return. She’s hooked up with him dozens of times over the last decade of her adult life. She’s ruined relationships over him. He’s not that hot, really; he’s definitely not that nice to her. But she’s addicted to him — and as director Leslye Headland would explain later that night at a post-screening Q&A, “One of the reasons people get to each other, even when they’re so bad fo