Brie happy to be just one of the nuns
From a habit to spandex. From no makeup to makeup apparently applied with a spray gun. From hair concealed by a coif to hair threatening to reach the sky. It may be difficult to think of a bigger dichotomy between consecutive roles than that Alison Brie finds herself in currently: Starring as a wrestler in “GLOW,” the Netflix series released on June 23, and a nun in “The Little Hours,” which opens in San Francisco on Friday, July 7.
“After this movie, I was like, ‘I want to wear almost nothing!’ ” she says about transitioning between the film and the television show. “’And really let all my aggression out!’”
The film, a comedy which follows Brie and her fellow nuns (Kate Micucci and Aubrey Plaza) around a convent (and into and out of various beds), is set a world away from the part-glamorous, part-grimy world of professional wrestling in the 1980s depicted on the Netflix series. Her characters, as well, work in opposition: a nun finding temptation and an actress looking for redemption (as well as steady work).
But the projects share one commonality: Both are strong ensemble pieces, with Brie playing a, but not the, lead role. Coming from a strong television background, these types of big casts have been her background: Jon Hamm and Joel McHale may have been the names in the biggest fonts for “Mad Men” and “Community,” respectively, but the former show won two Screen Actors Guild awards for outstanding performance by an ensemble in a drama series, and the latter program featured actors like Donald Glover and Ken Jeong, each of whom went on to star in their own television vehicles. Brie played Trudy, the putupon wife of Pete Campbell, on “Mad Men,” and the brighteyed, type-A college student Annie Edison on “Community.”
“My whole career,” she says, “I feel like I’ve always told my agents when we’re looking for work that I would rather be a part of a really good ensemble, on something I’m really passionate about, than be the star of something that doesn’t turn me on.”
The cast of “The Little
Hours” is an all-star team of comedians and comic actors; Micucci (of Garfunkel and Oates) and Plaza ( “Parks and Recreation,” “Legion”) make up the central threesome of nuns, with Dave Franco (Brie’s real-life husband) as the object of both affection and objectification. Floating around that setup: John C. Reilly as a disgraced church father, Molly Shannon as the head sister, Fred Armisen as a bishop, Nick Offerman as a lord and Adam Pally as a prison guard.
“Jeff (writer/director Baena) pitched it to me and described the people that would be involved, and that he was hoping to get Dave on board as well,” Brie said. “And we’d be shooting it in Italy, and there’d be no script so we would be sort of improvising it and collaborating on it together. It just sounded like a ’70s experimental film dream. I was like, ‘even if this movie turns out to be terrible, I feel like this could be a great, lifealtering adventure.’ And it was — and I still liked the product.”
As a comic actress, Brie is probably best known for her performance on the critically-beloved “Community.” But the tempo for film comedy can be different than it is on television, and Baena’s “Hours” traffics in grounded reactions to extraordinary settings, making underplaying the humor important.
“I feel like I have a tendency, coming from theater school, to go big, and this film is very quiet for a comedy,” she says. “Even when we were improvising dialogue, mostly when Jeff would make changes, he would strip it away, down to almost nothing. … And at the same time, we were wearing nun habits, and you’re really robbed of a sexual identity, of a physical identity, not able to use your body in that way.”
If Brie had any impulse to be more physical with her performance in “The Little Hours,” though, she certainly got that out of her system when she moved on to playing a professional wrestler in “GLOW.”
“It was a real strong reaction to the habit,” she says, laughing.