Interview: Alison Brie Talks Tapping into Something New With ‘Apples Never Fall’

Alison Brie shines in ensemble pieces like Netflix’s underrated series GLOW, NBC’s cult favorite Community, and now in Peacock’s binge-worthy Apples Never Fall. One of the things that makes her stand out is her vulnerability and how she grounds every performance in honesty, which makes you want to root for her, no matter the character.

Brie has played characters who desire control over every situation. With Apples Never Fall, she makes a hard left from previous A-type roles as Amy, the eldest of the Delaney siblings. Amy wears her heart on her sleeve to a fault and, for the most part, teeters between stepping into her own and being emotionally out of control when confronting the disappearance of her mother, Joy. 

The Delaneys like to keep up appearances. Each member seems like a success story, with Joy (Annette Bening) and Stan (Sam Neill) still riding on their former glory days as tennis coaches. Amy is different from the rest of her siblings. Unlike the other Delanyes, who give in to the distinguished pedigree of being a Delaney and what that specifically looks like to the outside West Palm Beach community, Amy can’t seem to find the right path, and she can’t fake it like the rest of her siblings, nor does she want to. As a viewer, it was a delight to see Brie playing to her comedic strengths and vulnerability by taking on someone so earnest about living out loud that it leads to unintentionally humorous moments, too. 

For Brie, it was the opportunity to tap into something different. “I love that Amy leads with her emotions. I feel like the characters that I play often want to be very in control of their emotions and not quite reveal them to people, but Amy is a great communicator. I loved her openness.” 

Awards Radar sat down with Alison Brie to discuss her turn in Apples Never Fall, the Community reunion, and much more. 

Niki Cruz: When I think of your TV work, you really shine in ensemble pieces like GLOW, Community, and now, Apples Never Fall. What appeals to you about being part of an ensemble?

Alison Brie: I love working with an ensemble. I feed off the energy and get excited to work with talented people. So that’s what drives the choices that I make. I’ve never had the ego of being like, it has to be my show. I want to work on good stuff. It can only elevate me as an actor. I think of working with Betty Gilpin on GLOW. I think it really made me a better actor working on Community, which has so many different styles of comedic performance and all these comedy assassins. I think that show, in particular, was a great learning experience for me early on, and now, working with Annette Bening and Sam Neill, I keep taking these master classes.

NC: As a viewer, I love a show with complicated family dynamics. It’s funny because you can have an A-type character in a family like the Delaneys, with so much pedigree, But Amy is someone who doesn’t fall in line. She’s veering so far left of what this family represents. That must have been appealing to take on, especially since you have played A-type characters who are buttoned up.

AB: Amy is a character that feels new and different to me in terms of what I’ve played on screen, but there are elements of her that exist within me, which I just feel like I haven’t been asked to tap into before. I think there are a lot of really funny things about the character, whether she is aware of those qualities or not.  

NC: I was talking to Melanie [Marnich] about the show a few days ago, and I said I felt like Amy was someone I knew or had an odd conversation with at a cocktail party. She’s into analyzing psychosomatic responses, life coaching, talking about everyone else’s feelings. She might whip out a few healing crystals at a party. 

AB: Definitely! Look, I went to art school, and I grew up in Los Angeles. I certainly had people to base this character on. I could pull from some very specific people I’ve known in my life for this, and that was fun. 

Amy is the biggest rebel in the Delaney family. Her rebellion is not making any life choices. To grow up in a competitive tennis family, where everything is goal-oriented, she sort of has released the idea of goal setting from her life, and I really admire that about her as a character.

NC: She completely throws caution to the wind. When I was watching, I couldn’t help but think that not only is that freeing, but it’s brave.

AB: I think it is brave, and it was fun to play. It was fun to let that creep into my life a little bit, to some extent, while we were shooting the show in Australia. 

NC: I love that every character has two timelines: one before Joy disappears and the one after she disappears. When Joy goes missing, it completely fractures this already unstable family and brings everything out. Amy seems to be attuned to her emotions, but as a result, she’s also kind of in an emotional spiral to a certain extent.  

AB: For Amy, her emotional spiral happens immediately and that ends up being a strength for her because she’s the first one to catastrophize the situation. She’s the first one to suspect the worst. It almost mentally prepares her for the rest of the information that they’re going to receive. Some of the other siblings were constantly blindsided. 

This whole family has a lot that they have not told each other. They have a lot of secrets from one another, and they need to purge those secrets to move forward. I don’t know what way forward there was for this family without bringing some of these secrets to light.

NC: With all of that in mind, how did you chart her arc, especially with those two timelines?

AB: On a surface level, the timelines were confusing, and we all had to check in with each other and with our directors constantly to be like, “Has this happened yet? Oh, no. Okay, it hasn’t.” Amy, she’s a character who seems to live in constant crisis. The family thinks she’s lived in full crisis for most of her life, but over the course of the show’s events, she kind of comes into her own. A big part of that is releasing her secret that people didn’t know about. As the eldest of the Delaney children, she starts to accept this role as the new matriarch. 

NC: There is something to be said about people who live in constant crisis, whether manifested themselves or brought in by external forces because they’re going to have a plan no matter what. 

AB: Yeah! Amy’s spirituality grounds her, too. It’s another thing that the whole family mocks, but at least she believes in something and has a guiding force through all the events. 

NC: Going back to what you said before about this role giving you the ability to tap into parts of yourself that you hadn’t had the chance to. Did you discover anything about yourself through this character? 

AB: I do feel like it gave me the opportunity to not hold on so tightly to my normal routines when I’m working because of how breezy the character is. I have a very strong work ethic and I’m married to my own mythology within that work ethic. Something about playing this character, letting me loosen the grip on that a little bit, actually made the work sing in a different way, which was exciting. Emotionally speaking, there were some new depths that I got to excavate for the role, and it was really fun.

NC: And it must have been fun to get your own episode. Amy’s is significant because she finds out that her family is validating the worst things she’s thought about herself, but we also see Amy and Joy’s relationship, and how Joy validates her existence in the Delaney family. 

AB: Joy was the only person in the family who would venture to even attempt to understand Amy and really did support her and was her protector in a lot of ways. That’s another thing that I think forces her to step into her power once Joy is gone. 

That episode alone was a big part of why I wanted to do the show. That episode was my Amy Bible. I would often go back to some of those lines of dialogue, which were the Amy ethos. You got to sort of see what really makes these people tick because, on the surface level, Amy could be a caricature, like you said, an archetype of a person that we’ve met, of a woo woo, crystal-loving, kind of spiritual person that you could poke fun at, but within that episode, you got to really understand the depth of her struggles, and I appreciated that.

NC: We get to see her empathy. She has a monologue when they’re trying to ID what they think is Joy’s body, and she’s hysterical, even when they find out it’s not Joy’s body. Amy gets confronted by her younger sister, who can’t understand Amy’s emotional response, but Amy gets the significance that Jane Doe, who they don’t know, is someone’s family member. What was it like to perform that breakdown?

AB: It was weirdly satisfying. What was beautiful about filming the show was feeling so supported by the cast. We were all so close. It was one of those days where I felt the cast’s support and everybody really giving me space. It’s cathartic for the character and for me, too. I was sobbing all day for hours, but it felt like a cathartic purge, and the character undergoes such a change. 

NC: I imagine it could be daunting to develop the nuanced relationship these siblings have. Siblings can also have wildly different perspectives on how they grew up despite being under the same roof, which I always think is fascinating about siblings. How was it to develop that sibling bond?  

AB: I loved that aspect of the show. I have an older sister, and even though sometimes we couldn’t seem more different, we speak the same language and have the same memories and history; it goes beyond heavy disagreements and things like that. Also, your siblings can cut you the deepest. I’ve had very few fights with my sister, but I feel like I never feel worse, you know what I mean? I love that there is a baseline of love. They’re always going to circle back even when they get quite far away from each other in terms of their beliefs.

There’s such a sensitivity that we have with our family and, at the same time, a lack of sensitivity. It’s such a hard thing to pinpoint and describe but I think that they sort of nailed it with the writing on this show. And then also there was an immediate chemistry with the cast. We got along so well. 

NC: It’s great that you had that type of experience. I’m thinking back to shows that are 22 episodes a season and you get to develop that kind of bond whereas this was a fast 8 or 9.

AB: I know it’s wild. Everybody just clicked right away, and it was so sweet. It starts with Sam and Annette, who couldn’t be lovelier. I also feel like we all sort of fell into our roles because Jake and I are older than Connor and Essi, who play our younger siblings, but I know what you’re talking about. My Community family. That’s family. We’ve been through the trenches together shooting 22 to 25 episodes a season, losing our minds in front of each other at four in the morning. That bond is DEEP.

NC: People are responding to the show. Whether the show acts as a cautionary tale about motherhood for those who don’t have kids OR moms making videos on TikTok saying yep, this is the emotional burden, that caregiving burden that happens when you’re a mother. What kind of response have you received?

AB: Well, I feel like it’s the most watched thing I’ve ever done which surprised me. I think I’ve been a part of shows that were so beloved and have had great fan bases, but the response to this felt so immediate. Maybe because people were excited who already had an attachment to the book, but I feel like it’s less about what people are saying and more the people I’m hearing from. 

It’s like my husband’s friend from college and his wife. The reach has been pretty vast and that has been exciting. It really has characters you can connect to, and also, there is a fair bit of comedy. It makes it feel like real life, where it’s not a melodrama because people can’t just stay in one emotion even when something serious is going on. You still kind of have the day to day things. So I feel like every person watching this, no matter what the dynamic is in their family, they’re like, “That’s like my family.”

NC: Before we go, do you have any tidbits about the Community movie? I know there’s been a bunch of headlines about people who are in it and who aren’t in it. Anything you can give us?

AB: There’s nothing new. We did get a script which made it feel all more real. So that’s exciting. Now it’s just the usual dance of dates. We sort of had some dates on the table. Now those dates are getting reimagined. So it’s tough. It’s a blessing. We had such a talented group of people working on that show, and everybody is continuing to stay busy. I think it will happen for sure.  

Catch Apples Never Fall on Peacock.

[This interview was edited for length and clarity]