Alison Brie has a totally bizarre connection to “The Room,” and it has to do with “Community”
Ready to have your mind blown? Alison Brie has lots of interesting connections to The Disaster Artist, a film about the making of Tommy Wiseau’s legendary cult film The Room.
In The Disaster Artist (in theaters December 8th), Brie’s brother-in-law James Franco plays Tommy (he also directed the film…in character). And Brie’s now-husband Dave Franco plays Tommy’s collaborator Greg Sestero. Brie, meanwhile, plays Greg’s GF Amber, and a lot of her comedian friends appear in the movie too.
Still with us? Good, because Alison Brie’s connections run even deeper.
So much so, in fact, that Brie has a connection to The Room itself by way of Community, the beloved comedy in which she played Annie Edison.
“I had never seen it,” Brie told HelloGiggles of her relationship with The Room prior to The Disaster Artist. “I had never gone to midnight screenings. But, my weird connection to it was that while shooting Community — maybe five years ago, I feel like we were in probably Season 3 or 4 — Gillian Jacobs was reading the book, The Disaster Artist, and was telling me all about it.”
Brie did, of course, have an ~awareness~ about the film. But there was a lot she didn’t know, like how a certain Community colleague was involved in the making of The Room…
“Obviously, I knew what The Room was because of the billboard in LA,” she continued. “The midnight screenings, they’re legends in this town. And I had had a curiosity about them, but had never gone. And then Gillian was talking to me all about the story behind it and we discovered, because it’s in the book, that Todd Barron — who is the credited DP on The Room — was our B-camera operator on Community.”
Brie and Jacobs picked Barron’s brain about his experiences, obvi. I mean, how could you not? And four years later, Dave signed onto the movie — with Brie eventually joining too. Talk about a small world, right?
