Even as a little girl, Alison Brie knew how to entertain a crowd. Now, the star of Mad Men and Glow is tackling the heartbreak of her grandmother’s struggles with mental illness
When Alison Brie was in middle school, her grandmother, who was schizophrenic and homeless, was knocked down by a car and left in a coma. “My family didn’t have the resources to care for her,” Brie says. “And she lived on the street.” On a visit to the hospital, she remembers struggling to connect the dirty homeless woman in the bed with a photo at home of her grandparents on their wedding day – “Dancing, looking beautiful, radiant.”
Brie, 37, who has alert, glacier-bright blue eyes, tells this moving story with unrehearsed candour. Talking publicly about her grandmother is still a fresh experience, and raw, but it’s also cathartic. For a long time, these were conversations she had only with her mother, but that time is over. Her new film, Horse Girl, now on
Netflix, is a fiction, but one that mines her grandmother’s story for a twisting meditation on mental illness with a mischievous coda: just because someone is schizophrenic doesn’t mean the
aliens aren’t real.