Dave Franco has heard your ideas about playing a certain person of interest — and he’s overwhelmed.
The Disaster Artist star reacted to the idea that he portray Luigi Mangione, the suspect charged with murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, while promoting Together, his new horror film with his wife, Alison Brie.
“I’ve never received more texts in my life about anything,” Franco said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, laughing. “Not just friends — anyone who has my phone number has reached out about it.”
Brie agreed that “everyone” has contacted Franco about his resemblance to Mangione, but clarified that she doesn’t think he’s gotten “any official offers” from studios or producers who actually want to cast her husband.
Franco confirmed, “No official [offers].”
Related: Yep, there’s already a Luigi Mangione documentary in the works from an Oscar-winning director
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Dave Franco at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival
When news of Mangione’s arrest broke on Dec. 9, numerous online spectators quickly made comparisons between the suspect and Franco — so many, in fact, that the actor experienced his third-most-popular week of Google searches of the past five years. (He was only slightly more Googled when he made his directorial debut with The Rental in the summer of 2020, and was at his most popular when he co-starred in Netflix’s Day Shift with Jamie Foxx in the summer of 2022.)
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However, in the event that Mangione’s saga does get adapted for film or TV, Franco probably isn’t quite the right pick to play the role — despite some physical resemblance, the actor is 39 while the suspect is 26. Yes, he’s played young before, but it might be a bit weird watching a man pushing 40 portray a character who graduated college during the pandemic.
Related: Watch Alison Brie streak through a hotel to try to calm husband Dave Franco’s movie-premiere nerves
Franco and Brie discussed appearing, well, together in Together during an interview with Entertainment Weekly at the Sundance Film Festival on Saturday. “She’s my favorite actress, so to get the chance to work with your favorite actress — what else can you ask for?” Franco said.
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“I do my best work when I’m working with Dave because I can’t make a false move in front of him,” Brie added. “He knows me better than anyone in the world, so there’s an inherent authenticity and comfortability when we’re working together. [In Together], we really have to go out on a limb for a lot of scenes, and we’re doing some crazy stuff, and there’s no self-consciousness because he’s seen me at my worst, he’s seen me at my best, and everything in between. So it was like, ‘Let’s just jump right in!'”
Franco said he was particularly awestruck by Brie’s physicality in the film. “I knew she had it in her — she kills it on GLOW — and she has gone to this gym for 15 years, and I’ve stayed away because I don’t wanna be seen with her there at the same time because she’s gonna shame me,” he explained. “That said, she really, really threw herself into this physically, and we do a lot of really intense stuff. There were times where she even pushed the stunt double aside and was like, ‘I got this. Let me do this one.'”
Addtional reporting by Alamin Yohannes.
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