DAVE FRANCO AND Alison Brie have been a part of some of the most memorable (and funniest) moments on the big and small screen over the last two decades—and have been romantically involved for the overwhelming majority of that time. The pair’s new movie, the body horror flick Together, finds the couple (who started dating in 2012 and tied the knot in 2017) playing an on-screen couple for the first time only to be faced with trouble in their relationship and with an overwhelming and unknown supernatural force.
Sounds, uh, stressful! Which makes this the perfect moment for the couple to take part in “Stress Test,” Men’s Health‘s video series where your favorite stars go through their careers and break down the moments that made life just a little bit tougher and put them a bit on edge.
Brie and Franco have both had impressive, long careers to this point—their resumes for being barely into their early 40s are lenghthy and filled with highlights. But, for one reason or another, some of their most stressful moments tend to keep coming back to one particular bodily function: peeing.
“There was a day where I was waiting around, and waiting around, and of course it was like, they need you on set right now! And they’re racing me to set, but I really had to pee,” Brie says, describing a particularly tricky day on the set of Mad Men, which was among her first major roles in the film and television business. “I ran into the bathroom, and I pulled up my skirt, and I just started peeing. But I had this 1960s girdle on… I just peed in my girdle. It was so gross!”
Franco, too, had an experience with #1 early in his career, though his is not quite as literal (or visceral). One of his first roles came as Greg the Soccer Player in Superbad, most notable for being reminded by Jonah Hill’s character that he peed his pants in elementary school (“People don’t forget!”). “All roads lead to pee,” Brie says.
“I would be walking down the street after the movie came out, and people would be yelling at me, ‘Why don’t you go piss yourself again,'” Franco recalled. “I quickly realized, ‘Oh, I need to keep working. I need more acting jobs so I’m not just Piss Boy for the rest of my life.”
Brie adds a referendum: “Though that is a nice nickname that we use—Piss Boy.”
This recurring theme continued through to Together, when there was a day of shooting where the two were attached to one another via a prosthetic for about ten hours.
“We were both trying not to drink water so we could avoid bathroom trips,” Franco says, “But inevitably, one of us would have to go, and we would drag the other one with us, and I remember there was a moment where she was peeing—”
“All roads lead to me peeing,” Brie interjects. “It’s very true.”
“I was standing over her,” Franco continues. “Attached to her, and thinking we could not have made this movie with anyone else. Then I handed her some toilet paper, and we went back to work.”
Evan is the culture editor for Men’s Health, with bylines in The New York Times, MTV News, Brooklyn Magazine, and VICE. He loves weird movies, watches too much TV, and listens to music more often than he doesn’t.
