The first official teaser for the eight-episode series, The Afterparty, has been released. The murder-mystery comedy is set to debut on January 2022 on Apple TV+. Check out the teaser below!
After The Rental, Dave has set his next directing project, and it will be for Amazon Studios’ Somebody I Used to Know. He co-wrote the script with his wife, Alison Brie, who is also set to star in the movie. Looking forward to this!
DEADLINE – After making his directing debut with the thriller The Rental, Dave Franco has found his next project, coming on to direct Somebody I Used To Know for Amazon Studios. Insiders also tell Deadline that Alison Brie, Jay Ellis and Kiersey Clemons are on board to star. Brie also co-wrote the script with Franco, and the film will be produced by Temple Hill’s Marty Bowen, Wyck Godfrey,and Isaac Klausner, and Black Bear’s Ben Stillman, Leigh Kittay,and Michael Heimler. Franco, Brie, Temple Hill’s Laura Quicksilver, Black Bear’s Teddy Schwarzman, and Bart Lipton will exec produce.
The film follows workaholic Ally (Brie) who, on a trip to her hometown, spends a night reminiscing with her ex-boyfriend Sean (Ellis), which makes her start to question everything about the choices she’s made and the person she’s become. Things only get more confusing when she meets Cassidy (Clemons), a younger woman who reminds her of the person she used to be.
“Alison and I love romantic comedies and were inspired by the classics from the ’80s and ’90s,” said Franco. “We couldn’t be more excited about working with Jay and Kiersey, who are both extremely natural performers, capable of bringing levity and drama in equal measure. And we’re so grateful to have partnered with Amazon Studios, who have been incredibly supportive in helping bring this project to life.”
“Audiences around the world are going to fall in love with Somebody I Used to Know just as much as we did,” said Julie Rapaport, Co-Head of Movies at Amazon Studios. “Dave and Alison have reimagined a beloved genre in a delightfully modern way. We could not be more thrilled to watch this incredible cast bring the film to life, shepherded by Dave’s vision, and to partner with Temple Hill and Black Bear to bring it to screen.”
Yes, you’re seeing it right, Dave went out to attend an event! It’s the special screening of Zola, a film that he produced. Check out photos in our gallery!
Firstly, Dave is celebrating his 36th birthday today and we would like to wish him a very happy birthday! Hope you’re staying safe and healthy and that you have a wonderful day.
Dave was on the cover of Icon Italia last February, primarily to discuss The Rental. You can’t deny he totally rocked the blond look! Check out outtakes and scans in our gallery, the photoshoot video below, and the interview under the cut.
New projects keep on coming! Dave has joined Netflix’s vampire-hunter feature film, Day Shift, starring Jamie Foxx!
DEADLINE – Dave Franco, Natasha Liu Bordizzo, Oliver Masucci, Steve Howey and C.S. Lee are set to join Jamie Foxx in Netflix’s Day Shift. J.J. Perry, best known for his work as a second unit director and stunt coordinator on films like The Fast and the Furious and Bloodshot, will make his directorial debut on the film.
Tyler Tice penned the script with current revisions by Shay Hatten. The film follows a hard-working blue-collar dad (Foxx) who just wants to provide a good life for his quick-witted daughter, but his mundane San Fernando Valley pool-cleaning job is a front for his real source of income: hunting and killing vampires as part of an international union of vampire hunters.
Great news, fellow Dave fans! Dave is part of an all-star cast for Apple TV Plus’ upcoming murder-mystery comedy, The Afterparty!
VARIETY – The eight-episode series is set at a high school reunion afterparty. Each episode will feature a retelling of the same night told through a different character’s perspective, each with its own unique visual format and film genre to match the teller’s personality.
Dave Franco is set to play Xavier, once a dorky high school drama student, now a famous pop star and actor. Franco has starred in features such as “The Disaster Artist,” the “Neighbors” and “21 Jump Street” films, and both “Now You See Me” films. His TV roles include “Scrubs” and “Greek.”
Dave and Alison did a one-on-one Q&A for Interview magazine. They discussed, of course, The Rental, GLOW, and so much more.The feature also highlights photos of Alison taken by Dave himself. Name a more adorable couple, we’ll wait.
DAVE FRANCO: Tell me a little bit about the movie and how you became involved.
ALISON BRIE: The movie is The Rental, written by Dave Franco and Joe Swanberg. It’s your directorial debut.
FRANCO: Interesting.
BRIE: It’s about two couples who go on a weekend away at a rental property, and things go awry. The cool thing about this project is that I got to witness you working on it and watching it evolve, while not knowing that I was going to be involved. I found it so inspiring watching you write with Joe. Every day, you would get home from writing, you’d be so excited and have all these new ideas. It inspired me to write Horse Girl with Baena [Brie], so that was a cool thing that was happening simultaneously. Getting to read all the different drafts of this script and see how you guys were honing in on the characters and sharpening them, and seeing how much care you took in creating these characters because you’re an actor. I don’t think I really gave you notes, but I think I got to give some feedback. It was very exciting when one day, you just turned to me in our living room, and you were like, “Maybe you should play Michelle.”
FRANCO: I always wanted you to play Michelle, but there was one iteration of the movie, where I was going to play one of the characters.
BRIE: Before you decided to direct it, you were writing it. You were going to act in it, but you were going to play another character or something. It was like, “Would it be weird if we’re in the same movie, and I’m playing another guy’s wife…”
FRANCO: I would’ve played your brother-in-law. Once I decided not to play the role, then obviously, you were the first choice for Michelle.
BRIE: Did you ever offer the role to anyone else? I was awake in bed last night, in the middle of the night, being like, “Did he offer this role to Kristen Bell or something, before he decided I should do it?”
FRANCO: No way.
BRIE: I remember feeling so excited and honored when you asked me to play the part. More than anything, I wanted to be with you for your first experience directing. Everything aside, obviously, the script was amazing. I think Michelle is maybe the best character. Objectively.
FRANCO: Michelle is really off on her own island for the second half of the film and gets to bring some much-needed levity to the project when things start to get dark.
BRIE: But not too much. You really wanted to keep it very grounded.
FRANCO: Speaking of, there’s a sequence in the film where your character is on drugs.
BRIE: On Molly.
FRANCO: Do you want to talk about how you prepared for that?
BRIE: Well, for the first half of the movie, she’s kind of the uptight wife and there’s a very sexy sort of love triangle happening with the other characters. She doesn’t want to party with everyone on the first night. The next night when there’s a lot of heavy shit going down, she’s on this drug. It’s a really fun aspect of her character.
Continue Reading
Dave also discussed The Rental with Insider, wherein he also confirmed that his next project will be the Vanilla Ice biopic!
Dave Franco will be the first to say he’s doing pretty well in quarantine.
“We’re mainly feeling lucky that we like our home and we like each other,” Franco told Insider over the phone last week.
The “we” he’s referring to is he and his wife, actress Alison Brie. The two have been together since meeting eight years ago in a night that ended with them both taking Molly (more on that later).
Along with marital bliss, Franco is happy to get his first feature directing effort out into the world, the horror movie “The Rental” (in select drive-ins and On Demand beginning Friday). He doesn’t star in it, but Brie (“GLOW”) does along with Dan Stevens (“Eurovision Song Contest,” “Beauty and the Beast”), and a creepy masked man tormenting them with a hammer.
So the Franco/Brie household is a frenetic place at the moment with the buzz surrounding their new movie. There are lots of phone calls to get last-minute arrangements ironed out, press interviews, and even the occasional call for Franco from Vanilla Ice.
Taking the director plunge
Directing is not a new interest for the 35-year-old actor. Franco admits he’s been making shorts, mainly for FunnyOrDie.com, for a decade. He had always been nervous to take the leap to directing a feature film but it suddenly became obvious after writing “The Rental” with fellow filmmaker Joe Swanberg (“LOL,” “Drinking Buddies,” “Win It All”).
“Once I wrote this script with Joe, I realized that I knew these characters and this story more intimately than anyone and my nerves went away,” Franco said.
The creepy movie follows two brothers (Dan Stevens and Jeremy Allen White) and their significant others (Alison Brie and Sheila Vand) who stay at an Airbnb for the weekend. As the story evolves, we begin to see flaws in many of the characters and signs of racism from the man who oversees the property (played perfectly by longtime character actor Toby Huss).
But when the houseguests realize that cameras are planted around the rental, it leads to a bloody ending as a mystery man takes out the main characters.
As Insider’s Libby Torres wrote in her review of the movie, “the film’s power comes from how expertly it combines quotidian anxieties… with a tense game of cat and mouse.”
Filmmaker Sean Durkin (“Martha Marcy May Marlene”), who Franco said he went after to direct the movie before finally taking it on himself (Durkin is an executive producer on “The Rental”), said it was the meshing of genres in the story that grabbed him.
“It sets up this character drama but is interrupted by a slasher film, so I loved that it was doing something different but still delivers what it promises,” Durkin told Insider.
Franco said he felt like the right person to direct the story because this is a topic he thinks about all the time.
“I was inspired by my own paranoia about home sharing and thinking about how the country is divided as it’s ever been, no one trusts each other, yet we trust staying at the home of a stranger simply because of some five-star review,” Franco said, noting that he even stayed at an Airbnb while shooting the movie, and was completely filled with anxiety as the place was called “The Old Rustic Cabin.”
“My paranoia has reached its peak since filming this,” Franco said with a laugh. “Every time I stay in a rental home now I’m not thinking are there cameras here but where are they?”
Continue Reading
 August 05 | 'Day Shift' Dallas Screening |
 August 05 | 'Despierta America' |
 August 04 | 'Day Shift' Atlanta Screening |
 August 02 | 'Day Shift' Fan Screening |
 Screencaptures > Official Trailer |
 Production Stills |