After bizarre 'Together' ending, Alison Brie and Dave Franco are 'not having kids'
Spoiler alert! We're discussing major details about the ending of the new movie “Together” (in theaters now). Stop reading if you haven't seen it yet and don't want to know.
Dave Franco and Alison Brie were game to do whatever in “Together,” which finds them sawing their arms apart, eating each other’s hair, and banging their heads into shower walls and frosted glass doors.
But there was one scene that gave both actors pause in the whacked-out horror movie. After drinking from a pool of otherworldly cave water, Tim (Franco) and Millie (Brie) discover that their bodies are violently drawn together. The dissatisfied couple initially tries to resist the urge to fuse their flesh, but in the end, they choose to let their bodies combine in a disrobed display of bone-crunching, skin-melding terror.
“All day, Dave and I were standing genitals to genitals naked in a scene that was going to end up being real effects-heavy,” Brie recalls. “You’re relying on things that you can’t see in the moment, and we did look at each other like, ‘I hope this works out OK.’ ”
“We knew in the moment this was very strange,” Franco adds. “It would be a pretty good Christmas card if we weren’t both fully nude.”
Before their bodies start to contort and merge, Tim and Millie rip off their clothes in the living room, hugging as they dance to the Spice Girls’ “2 Become 1.” Licensing the 1996 pop hit for the film cost nearly the entire music budget, but “it felt impossible to think of something that tops ‘2 Become 1,’ ” Brie says. “That song was made so that this scene could be made.”
The freaky fusion sequence was always how writer/director Michael Shanks pictured ending the movie.
“There’s something romantic and sad about it, but also funny and nasty,” Shanks says. “As we were making it, I was like, ‘Let’s lean in to showing the ribs cracking and the eyes going nuts.’ I wanted to end on a crazy image. People walk out of the theater being like, ‘What?!’ ”
In the film’s climax, Millie discovers that her coworker, Jamie (Damon Herriman), is actually an ex-cult member who successfully merged his body with his partner’s. Tim also ventures into a nearby cave and finds a missing hiker couple, whose figures have melded into a gory monstrosity. But the movie leaves much of its mysteries unanswered.
“I’m not super-interested in the mythology,” Shanks says. “We’ve all seen horror movies where it screeches to a halt so a character can explain, ‘OK, this is how it works’ or ‘This is what it is.’ ” Rather, the film “gives you enough breadcrumbs to figure it out and fill in the blanks.”
In the final shot of "Together," Millie’s parents stop by the house for lunch. When the front door opens, they’re greeted by an androgynous person with longish hair, thick eyebrows and a deep voice.
Although many viewers – this reporter included – might assume that’s an entirely different actor, it’s actually just Brie with a mix of prosthetics and visual effects altering her face.
“We fondly call them Tillie,” Brie says of their characters’ uncanny amalgamation. “Basically, it’s me in Dave’s clothes with shoulder pads, a wig and Dave’s eyebrows. I will say, in one of the test screenings that we did for the movie, I snuck in the back of the theater to hear everybody’s responses to this final person. One woman raises her hand and goes, ‘I mean, it just looks like Alison Brie.’ I turned to our producer and said, ‘That’s the meanest thing that’s ever been said about me!’ ”
“But if that’s what we look like when we’re fused together,” Franco jokes, “maybe that’s further reinforcement that we should not have children.”
“Yeah,” Brie deadpans. “This is the reason we’re not having kids!”