Alison Brie is still skeptical about the Community movie

Lately, the promise of six seasons and a movie from Community has felt closer than ever. Creator Dan Harmon recently said that “Legitimacy is here, conversations, and agreements are happening,” which, while vague, is the most promising update yet. And in a new interview for The Daily Beast’s podcast The Last Laugh, Alison Brie—also partially responsible for keeping the dream alive—promises that “the wheels are turning.”

However, she also adds, “With Community stuff, I’m still just like, I feel very optimistic, but also, I’ll believe it when I see it.” A writer herself, Brie sounds happy to defer the job to Harmon, but she did have some ideas for the film’s direction: “I’m sort of like, let’s do fan service. Don’t try something that’s so crazy. Let’s get us back to Greendale. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel.” Brie also says they’d love to have Donald Glover back however possible: “Like, let’s carve out a single day, green screen, could we send someone to wherever Donald is in the world and just get a shot of his face saying something?”

While that’s still in the works, fans will get a dose of Community with Brie’s upcoming romantic comedy Somebody I Used To Know, co-written by Brie and her husband Dave Franco. The movie co-stars another alum of the NBC series, Danny Pudi. “It’s the first time that Danny and I have acted together since Community,” she teases. “And it was so fun to be back on set. Immediately our antics from the past were right in the forefront, and a lot of them made it on screen. I think that Community fans will be happy to see our characters together in that.”

Speaking of antics, Brie speaks fondly of her behind-the-scenes experience on Community, especially compared to Mad Men, on which she appeared simultaneously and compared to “doing Checkov or something.” “I would often say to people, you wouldn’t recognize me on the other set,” she explains. “On the set of Mad Men I was very quiet, very focused. It was this dramatic show, and also because of the nature of Trudy’s storyline most of the time, it was just me and Vincent Kartheiser. … I was over on the quiet set with a single actor and we were digging in.”

On the other hand, “[The] Community set was like a children’s playground. It was an explosion of noises and sounds and we would just be talking and doing bits right up until ‘action’ and then go into the scene,” she recalls. “Even between takes, we shot such long hours over there, and just to entertain ourselves we were always making silly videos. And as that series went on, it really felt like we all developed our own language. I always kind of felt for guest stars who came in, because we would try to be very warm and inclusive, but at the same time the jokes that we were making were based on a bit that got cut from an episode in season two.”

Brie says she did enjoy rewatching the series when it landed on Netflix in 2020. “And the jokes in my mind are an alt line that never even made it into the episode,” she shares. “So the fan experience of the show is quite different from our experience of making and watching it. But yeah, we were like little kids. It was really fun.”