Alison Brie on 'Sleeping with Other People', 'Mad Men', and being a very serious actress

Alison Brie now finds she can make a living out of the way she has always joked around with friends

Seriously funny: Alison Brie (AFP/Getty)

As the cheated-upon wife Trudy Campbell, Alison Brie played the most moralistic character on Mad Men, but in person she is far more like the sharp-witted and gregarious personality seen on her Funny or Die videos. She is arguably the star of the popular internet channel and is now transferring her talents to the big screen.

The 33-year-old recently got engaged to actor Dave Franco, and when I meet Brie in London she's sporting a bling ring. The Los Angeles native has just finished shooting Victorian-era costume drama Doctor Thorne, a TV mini-series adaptation of Anthony Trollope's novel, scripted by Julian Fellowes and produced by Harvey Weinstein.

“I was excited because Julian was telling me he was a fan and wanted me to do something of his,” maintains Brie. “I love Downton Abbey and I've never done something like that before. I worked on Mad Men for seven years, but it's a different period. So it's exciting coming from a theatre background to do anything where you get to wear very interesting costumes.”

So she swapped her girdle for a corset, and says of the experience: “On day one, I thought I was going to die.” In Doctor Thorne she plays an American character, Martha Dunstable, and is the only American in a cast that includes Tom Hollander and Ian McShane.

Yet it's a state that she's used to. Back when she was studying theatre, she spent a semester at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, where she soon got used to local stereotypes: “It's in Glasgow, so I was getting down and dirty man and I know how to kick someone's teeth in, just like that.” And those from Edinburgh, “So posh, not my style.”

Brie is always looking for the angle that will create laughs and there are a lot of them while we chat. She has a killer knack of being able to play to the crowd. Trying to get her to be serious is more of a battle. She chose Glasgow because “at the time, there was a lot of cool theatres doing really inventive stuff, and that was interesting. Also I think the whole experience for me was more about courage and doing new things, to go into a new country and school, where you don't know anyone, it was an exercise in fearlessness.”

But, at one time, Brie thought she wouldn't display this comedic side in her work. When she left school she saw her career as being dominated by drama: “Coming out of theatre school and doing a lot of roles in theatre, I considered myself a very serious actress. It wasn't until I started working on Community for NBC, that I realised that this is fine, the way I joke around with my friends, that you can also make a living doing that. So it's more my personality that lends itself to comedy.”

Brie with Jason Sudeikis in 'Sleeping with Other People' (Icon film distribution)

In the cult TV show Community she plays compulsive over-achiever Annie Edison. But having lit up television screens for years, she's now being chased down by movie directors. I point out that her fiancé must be asking some questions given that her two upcoming films are called Sleeping with Other People and How to Be Single. It's the only time she goes stone cold serious, “Well that's what is great about what we do, it's all pretend.”

“It's actually been very interesting,” she then adds about Sleeping with Other People. “Jason Sudeikis and I, we didn't really acknowledge this until after we got the movie, we both made this movie while we are in love and in very strong relationships.” This fact changed how she viewed her perennially single character. “We have a bit of distance from when we were single and going through some of what the characters are going through. I feel like it would have been a different experience if I were single shooting this movie, it might have been a little bit too dark.”

In Sleeping with Other People her character suffers from a sex addiction and it “was very different from Mad Men. I like how contemporary the script was and the way people talk about sex feels very current to me. It's very different from American in the 1960s where so much was unspoken, where everything shady going on was going on behind closed doors. Here people are, like, I'm going to ask and I'm going to tell you everything, and even if you don't ask, I'm going to tell you everything.”

In the Valentine's Day date movie How to Be Single, she plays a woman with questionable techniques on how to land the right guy; “She's a type-A personality and really trying to find her husband. She's happy in work and life, but on about 10 different dating sites and has developed an algorithm to find the right guy. She's smart but doing it in a very interpersonal way.” Brie shakes her head at her character's foolishness as she says this. “She's not going to sit in a bar and meet a guy, she's going to sit at a bar with a computer and find the perfect combination.”

Looking back at Mad Men she says she never got bored of playing Trudy. “Trudy was a totally fascinating and interesting character to me, but she was always changing, that was what was great about the show, no character was left underdeveloped. If they were going to spend time with a character, even if it was for one episode, they were going to be a fleshed-out character and have depth.”

Brie as Trudy Campbell in 'Mad Men' (AMC)

Brie was born in Hollywood, both literally and figuratively: “I came out of the womb singing.” Her mother works at a child-care agency, while her dad is a musician. “I would do plays in the house for everyone. I used to put on almost vaudeville style singing and dancing shows for neighbours. Our favourite thing to do was closer to Saturday Night Live, when my parents would have friends over, I would get all my friends together and we would come up with pretty funny skits and we would get costumes and they were always kind of dirty. We would get a hotdog and make it into a penis, and I would put a big trenchcoat on and we would do these ads for wieners, that were like your penis and also you can eat it. This is me at seven or eight years old.”

And how did her Jewish mother, and her Christian-Hindu father react? “They were drinking and laughing, they thought it was hysterical. I think I always had this need to perform and looking back I did like to make people laugh, and I guess it did start with the comedy more than anything.”

'Sleeping with Other People' is out in cinemas and VoD on Friday. 'How to Be Single' is out on 19 February. 'Doctor Thorne' will air on ITV later in 2016