Dave Franco and Alison Brie break down “Together'”s“ ”sticky bathroom stall scene: 'A little bit of dick goes a long way'

Dave Franco and Alison Brie have both insisted they wouldn't have wanted to star in their recent body horror flick Together with any other actor. One particularly intimate scene, in which their characters have a traumatic sexual episode in a bathroom stall, is a good example of why.

In the film, which was released last month and is now available on digital, the real-life married duo play Tim and Millie, a longtime couple whose relationship issues are exacerbated when they move from the city to the suburbs to accommodate Millie's career. But when a hike through the woods lands them stuck overnight in a mysterious cave, they return home the next day with a supernatural affliction: Their bodies seem attracted to each other like magnets. And when they touch, their skin begins to fuse.

The nature of the story and the effects used to bring it to life meant Franco and Brie spent hours literally attached on set. In a previous interview with Entertainment Weekly, they admitted they even had to use the bathroom together between takes to keep the prosthetics intact.

But it was a fictional bathroom scene, which occurs toward the middle of the film, before their characters fully understand what's happening to their bodies, that proved to be the most physically challenging.

"The bathroom sequence was weirdly one of the most exhausting scenes to shoot, and we did not see that coming, given the nature of all the other scenes in the film," Brie tells EW in an interview alongside her costar husband.

The scene takes place in a school, where Millie has just started to work as a teacher. When Tim comes to speak with her during the school day, one thing leads to another, and they end up getting hot and heavy in a bathroom stall. But before long, their newfound curse gets in the way of the fun, and their private parts begin to stick together.

"That was my favorite scene in the script, and it's still my favorite scene in the movie," Brie says.

"We were both really excited to go into it, and then shooting it, I think there was something about the claustrophobic nature of being in a bathroom stall, the tension, all of the fake sweat that makeup was applying to Dave, that he was then rubbing all over my face," she adds, joking, "He was annoying. He was not a fan of this."

Things get even stickier for the couple when another teacher walks into the bathroom, putting Millie's newly secured job at risk. "That was one of the only days when the inherent tension between the characters was hard to shake," Brie reflects.

Franco jokes that the scene also contains one of the scariest shots in the film: when his character's penis (a prosthetic) is shown onscreen, painfully stretching as Tim hurriedly tries to remove himself from Millie.

"We realized last night at the premiere that the quick insert shot of the dick is maybe the biggest jump scare in the movie," he says with a laugh.

"The dick shot was actually shot on a separate day while we were on a sound stage," Brie recalls. "We had three different units shooting the scene in the cave, shooting blood dripping off a table, and then in one small corner of the room, it's just me with my leg tied up and a dildo that's attached to a pair of bike shorts."

Still, the actress says "the trickiest thing to navigate" was determining "the amount of time that we should let that shot exist in the movie." She adds, "In an early cut, we were looking at that stretched-out dick for a long time."

"You realize a little bit of dick goes a long way," Franco says with a laugh. "I learned this actually from the movie Neighbors. Christopher Mintz-Plasse's character in that film had a notoriously very large penis. And in the first cut of the movie, that penis was everywhere. And the test audiences let everyone know that they didn't want that penis everywhere."

Ultimately, Franco continues, "The filmmakers discovered that the perfect amount of dick on screen is only 14 frames. That's all you need."

"You found the magic number," Brie jokes, as Franco adds, "That was the best piece of advice I imparted to our director."

For those curious, the actor reveals that he had no input on the size or shape of his character's member. "This is a really low-budget movie," he explains. "We had this amazing practical effects guy, Larry [Van Duynhoven], who was essentially doing us a favor in between jobs...We wouldn't see the prosthetic pieces until the morning of the shoot."

He adds, "That said, if I could have given any notes, would I have made it a little thicker? Sure."

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"You have to remember that you're seeing it really stretched out," Brie notes.

Together director Michael Shanks tells EW in a separate interview that his wife actually came up with the idea for the scene.

"I think it's the best scene in the film," he says. "When she pitched that scene to me, I was like, 'Oh no, that's too gross. That's too far.'" But the more he thought about it, he says, "I was like, 'Well, maybe she's right.' And yeah, it turned out to be the best scene in the film, I think."

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