Alison Brie is the most underrated actor of our time

A few days ago, I came across a video of Dave Franco and wife Alison Brie leaving the gym. In it, he grabs the sweat rag off her shoulder and wrings it out into his mouth. It was part of a slew of obviously staged pap videos promoting their new film Together – truly, the attention economy has a lot to answer for when getting eyeballs on a mid-budget indie film requires the commitment levels of a Jackass dare – but still, I kind of loved it.

Each of these promo stunts has summoned the full wrath of the cringe police (the couple did eat a French fry like the dogs in Lady and the Tramp, to be fair), but at least watching them goof around has been fun in a way actors rarely allow themselves to be anymore.

All charm and chemistry, the videos haven’t just been a marketing win. They have also reminded me about Alison Brie: funny, mischievous, a balm to the po-faced veneer so many actors hide behind, and one of the most underrated performers of our time.

I’ve been a fan of hers since she sashayed through the smoke-filled corridors of Mad Men as Trudy Campbell, the razor-sharp wife who refused to fade into the wallpaper as her philandering husband Pete, well, philandered his way through the assorted models, wives and teenage au pairs of the Upper East Side. (“I’m drawing a 50-mile radius around this house, and if you so much as open your fly to urinate,” she memorably warned him over breakfast one morning, those big bushbaby eyes blazing, “I will destroy you.”)

Since then, she’s hopscotched across genres, from cult sitcoms to indie dramas to Netflix wrestling rings, building a career as varied as it is underrated. It’s been a slow-burn rise – more beloved by fans than loudly trumpeted by Hollywood – but also a masterclass in curating a career on your own terms. In this era of hyper-managed, brand-safe stardom, I can’t help but find her inspiring.

Her biggest acting hits (beyond Trudy) have been Annie Edison in Community – all wide-eyed panic and over-caffeinated enthusiasm, a walking to-do list in a cardigan (though Brie played her with such warmth she never tipped into caricature) – and Ruth Wilder in GLOW. This should have been her breakout moment. As the failed actress turned reluctant wrestler, she was messy, desperate, funny, stubborn and heartbreaking, sometimes all in the same scene.

But alas, GLOW became another jewel in Brie’s crown of cult classics – cancelled due to the pandemic before it had a chance to fully dent the mainstream. Was it “a bit crap”, to quote my boyfriend? Well, I enjoyed it, and it did land her two Golden Globe nods, but the public (and, indeed, the industry) seemed unable to see past her as the ultra-upright “Type A” Trudy-slash-Annie hybrid.

Her response? She started writing and producing her own projects – Horse Girl, Spin Me Round, Somebody I Used to Know – films often labelled “off-kilter” or “kooky”, but each circling the disorientation of being a woman in the modern world.

Admittedly, they’re kind of patchy. Horse Girl, for instance, sets up as a quirky indie before tilting hard into psychological thriller territory. It was partly inspired by Brie’s grandmother’s experience with paranoid schizophrenia, a deeply personal thread stitched into an otherwise surreal story about loneliness, alienation, and identity. What I love about it is that she had both the creative ambition and the guts to not only write the story – to “go there” (she was exploring her fear that madness runs in her family) – but also get it green-lit and financed. The film industry seems inhospitable to original stories nowadays, so her determination to carve out roles and narrative that the establishment wouldn’t hand her is nothing short of radical.

A huge fan of horror, next she’s planning to direct her own “female-forward” horror film. In an era where the entire Hollywood machine risks sinking into cultural irrelevance, it needs more stars like her – willing to take big swings, get messy and actually look like you’re having fun doing it. Fine, it might yet take something like a superhero franchise to give her the A-list status she deserves – perhaps, her supervillain role in Masters of the Universe in 2026 – and if that’s the case, at least the press promos will be funny.