SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains spoilers about a particular scene in writer/director Michael Shanks’ Together. If you have not yet seen the film, you can ready my spoiler-free CinemaBlend review; otherwise, proceed at your own risk!
Being a very proud new entry to the body horror subgenre, Together is a movie with plenty of nastiness and extremes, and easily one of the best examples is what can casually be called the “bathroom stall scene.” When Dave Franco’s Tim is meant to be going away for rehearsal with a band that wants him to tour with them, he instead finds himself supernaturally drawn to the school where Alison Brie’s Millie works. A mix of uncontrollable urges and a chance to end their sex drought as a couple leads them to hook up in a public toilet – but things go from passionate to panicked as Tim disturbingly can’t seem to... disengage.
It’s a complicated scene: it’s both humorous and horrific, it features some of the movie’s most graphic material, and you can tell just from watching it that it must have been supremely difficult to film. So, of course, I felt compelled to ask about it last month when I interviewed Michael Shanks, Alison Brie and Dave Franco during the new horror movie’s press day in Los Angeles.
Alison Brie And Dave Franco Love The Bathroom Stall Scene, But It Was Exceptionally Uncomfortable To Film
For actors, there is surely a natural expectation of awkwardness that comes with filming a sex scene. That’s true for sequences where two characters are getting intimate on a comfortable mattress covered in silk sheets – but now swap out that comfortable setting in your mind for a stall in a public bathroom, and you can understand why the sex scene in Together was a special challenge.
The sequence is one of the best in the film, and Alison Brie identified it as her favorite moment in the script when she first got the chance to read it, but she also totally underestimated just how grueling it would be to perform. She loves how it turned out, but both the physical and emotional aspects of it ended up being tremendous. Seated beside her co-star/husband Dave Franco, Brie said,
It's wild. I have to say that was always my favorite scene. Reading the script it was my favorite scene; after we shot it and now in the film, it continues to be one of my favorite scenes. But it was weirdly one of the most difficult days on set, and I didn't see it coming. Because we have other scenes in the film that are more physically taxing, but something about the claustrophobic nature of being in a stall, the tension between the characters, it wore us down. That was one of the more exhausting days on set for sure.
As captured in the video at the top of the article, the two actors detailed how their closeness in filming the sequence got a bit gross even without any supernatural forces trying to fuse them together. Because Tim is basically a slave to his urge to be with Millie in the moment, Dave Franco was given spritzes of fake sweat to suggest a sickness caused by being without her, and that combined with real sweat he was producing as a result of physical exertion/close quarters in the stall. It was not comfortable.
Director Michael Shanks estimated that it took somewhere in the range of eight hours to shoot the sequence in the bathroom stall, and Dave Franco acknowledged that there was a level of claustrophobia that colored things:
I think the sheer just like amount of time that we spent on that scene too. It's just really pent up the whole time.
It was tough to shoot, but shooting the sequence also had some surprising wins – like lucking into a box of sex toys that the effects team was able to use for what is arguably the most shocking shot in Together.
Facing Budget Problems, Together Lucked Into ‘A Shoebox Full Of Genitals’
Alluded to above, the Together sequence in discussion here ironically doesn’t reach its climax as the characters are having sex, but instead in the immediate aftermath. For a brief moment, Tim and Millie and giggly and happy, but those positive emotions evaporate as the former is physically unable to separate himself from the latter. Initially, it seems that the audience is only going to register the drama via the fear expressed by the characters, as they are only framed from the waist up – but then there is a shocking angle that goes between them, and we see what I’m going to politely refer to as the compromised circumstances of Tim’s penis.
It’s graphic, and you probably would not expect the title that Michael Shanks used as a reference point:
I was trying to figure out – there's a movie that I'm thinking of where something kind of like this happens, and they hold off, and then they show it kind of late, and I was like, 'That's the rhythm I wanna go for.' And I still dunno if I'm entirely correct, but I think I was thinking of Something About Mary. And I kind of used that as an example to tell the actors and to tell the producers like, 'Hey, I know this is gonna sound like too big of a swing, but I think we have to do this.'
As far as actually getting the shot, however, there was a practical issue: money. Released into theaters this past week by Neon, Together was made an independent production shot in Australia, and budgetary restrictions meant that not every part of the vision for the movie could be realized. But for the graphic shot of Tim’s stuck penis, luck ended up winning out over frugalness.
Michael Shanks told me that there wasn’t room in the budget for the practical/visual effects required to get the shot, but he ended up being fortunate in that his partner at the time was working for a sex toy company and was able to supply the production. Said the writer/director,
We had already maxed out our budget for visual effects and prosthetics, but she was like, 'I have some realistic genital prosthetics at my work that we can have for free.' And I'm like, 'Yes!' So we got those and our prosthetics guy then kind of painted it up and added like details…It was so lucky. And I remember the day we were on set, we were shooting that scene, and the prosthetics guy just showed up with a shoebox and opened up the shoebox, and it's just like, 'Oh, it's a shoebox full of genitals. This is like the most horrific thing I've ever seen.'
In most workplaces, someone showing up with a shoebox full of sex toys would probably be grounds for dismissal, but I suppose that’s why you have to love the specialness of the film industry.
This Is Where A Married Couple Acting Together Is Super Helpful
The sex scene in Together is graphic, and shooting it was immensely uncomfortable for the stars, but getting free dildos via the director’s partner wasn’t the only “organic” benefit the production had: filming would have been much more awkward if the two stars were relative strangers, but Alison Brie and Dave Franco have been a romantic couple since 2012, and they have been married since 2017.
Working with a spouse isn’t necessarily always a boon, and one watches the romantic drama of Together wondering if the on-screen conflict between the characters had the actors reflecting on their own relationship – but in the case of the bathroom stall scene, their shared history allowed Alison Brie and Dave Franco to be a bit more emotionally free. Discussing how shooting the scene with her husband made it different than it would have been with a different co-star, Brie said,
I can imagine getting a little short with someone. Like we've talked a lot about how like it was nice not always having to be polite with one another. 'Cause we know that we love each other and it's easy to work around that. Like shooting a tense scene like that was someone and then having to tip toe around them in any way I think would just add to the exhaustion honestly.
Adding to her comments, Franco noted that they were both able to make certain choices and take certain chances that they otherwise may not have been able to make because they had the inherent trust and support of their scene partner:
In any movie, when you have a co-star and you're trying to develop this chemistry and feel comfortable enough to then take risks with them on set, we're able to surpass all of that. When we're doing certain scenes that I'm sure people watch and are like, 'Whoa, that's wild,' We probably didn't even think about it.
It’s a special working relationship, and one that helped yield one of gnarliest big screen moments of 2025 so far.
Also starring Damon Herriman, Together premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival and is now playing in theaters everywhere – the low-budget, critically acclaimed feature landing in sixth place at the weekend box office.
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