Love is a many-splendored thing, especially when you’re gawking at it from the outside. In this column, we examine the celebrity couples who give us hope for our own romantic futures as we try to learn what we can from their well-documented bonds.
For someone who literally writes a column frothing about how cute I think celebrity-for-celebrity relationships are, I have to admit that I’m not a huge fan of a couples’ press junket. (Too much awkward, stilted chitchat between people who clearly know each other way too well for that!) Well, Alison Brie and Dave Franco’s recent stint promoting Michael Shanks’s new body-horror film Together—in which the spouses play a longtime, deeply codependent pair who move to the countryside and literally begin to get sick when they’re apart from each other—are proving the exception to that rule.
Brie and Franco, who have been together for a whopping 15 years, recently went on Today to discuss playing a miserable couple onscreen, and I was extremely charmed by their laid-back yet earnest couples’ energy.
“Creatively, I think [Brie] is one of the best actresses working today, which makes my job very easy,” said Franco, who, with his wife, is also a producer on Together. And while I hesitate to give men credit for being nice about their partners (likely thing for them to do, in an ideal world!), I do like how infatuated Franco seems to be with Brie; to paraphrase Mindy Kaling’s mom, the best hetero couples are the ones in which the guy likes the girl a little bit more than the girl likes the guy.
Obviously, I don’t know anything about Brie and Franco’s real-life dynamic, since my IRL familiarity with them as a couple is limited to once glimpsing them at a bottle shop in Highland Park and swiftly texting everyone I knew about it, but I’ve loved Brie an inordinate amount ever since she voiced Diane Nguyen on BoJack Horseman (not to mention her deep dive into the weird and wonderful world of ’80s women’s wrestling on Glow!). And while I’m not a fan of his brother James, Franco seems to be cut from a different cloth, though he’s basically always cast as Douchey Frat Guy thanks to the haunting symmetry of his face.
Perhaps my favorite detail of the Together rollout is the fact that distributor Neon is giving couples who see the film on opening weekend free therapy via the online service OurRitual. (Yes, we live in a late-capitalist hellscape.) Personally, I am a huge couples’ therapy stan after going into my first appointment with my partner, fearing that we were already cooked if we needed a couples’ therapist in the first place—we’re not, FYI, and I was being extremely dumb—so I’m enjoying this little bit of mental-health-meets-movie-magic synergy. Here’s hoping that Brie and Franco are too.
