The community spirit and awful on-screen romances of Alison Brie

Stand back. It’s Alison Brie. The rising star, Hollywood by birth and profession, is not one of those mumbling Californians who regards conversation as an embarrassing burden. Dark and sharp, she relishes every opportunity for friendly banter.

People now talk to her in the 7-11. Brie is not quite a superstar, but she appears (or voices) the sorts of shows that fans really, really care about. She was Trudy, the awful Pete Campbell's long-suffering wife, in Mad Men. She is the ambitious Annie Edison in the much-loved cult comedy Community. She voices Diane Nguyen on BoJack Horseman. From New Year's Day you can see her in a very nifty new comedy, Sleeping with Other People.

So, when fans approach her, which series do they mention most often?

"You know these days it's pretty much 50-50," she says. "It depends where you are. I can always tell which fan it's going to be. Ha ha. The Community fans are more timid. The Mad Men fans are a little bolder and a bit older. What I get more often these days is, 'You look a lot like Alison Brie.' They don't quite admit to recognising me. I should wear more make-up when I go out."

Unconventional dad 

Brie has been in and around the business all her life. Her dad, Charles Terry Schermerhorn, sounds interesting.

When Alison was a kid, he made his living as a singer-songwriter. Later he became a freelance entertainment journalist.

As a result, the acting business didn’t seem quite so daunting as it might have done if her dad had been an architect from Akron.

“At home he was always playing music,” she says. “It was a very artistic household. That was inspiring. When he did take over my granddad’s business and became an entertainment journalist, I remember stories of the Oscars and meeting celebrities. That made acting as a career seem accessible.”

After cutting her theatrical teeth at the local Jewish community centre, Brie moved on to the California Institute of the Arts and the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (now called Royal Conservatoire of Scotland) in Glasgow.

“That was fantastic,” she nearly bellows. “It was great for a girl from California to encounter some real weather.”

She doesn't remember too many rough days when she was starting out. After all, as a Los Angeleno, she always had the family home on hand when the auditions didn't go so well. Brie was still living at home when she secured the Mad Men role in 2007.

"Come to think of it, I was still at home when I started Community," she says.

Trudy Campbell labours at the rough end of the gender tyrannies of Mad Men. While characters such as Peggy Olsen and Joan Harris secure a degree of professional autonomy, Trudy spends her time coping with her mostly dreadful husband: the insecure, dishonest, ultimately balding Pete Campbell.

The politics of Mad Men are tricky. To what extent does its appeal rest on a guilty relish in the unreconstructed bad behaviour: fags, booze, adultery?

“I am sure that has something to do with it,” she says cautiously. “For a show that reveals so much racism and sexism and talks about how people couldn’t connect, it remains a very romantic piece of work. The costumes are beautiful. People are smoking a cigarette and drinking Scotch at work. If you can forget about civil facts and all those problems, you can convince yourself it might have been great to live then.”

Did she not yearn to play one of the more liberated characters? Did she not feel constrained throughout? “Well, you can see the exceptions, such as Joan and Peggy. The show was about strong women. For me it was interesting, as a person for whom marriage is not necessarily a goal, to be playing somebody for whom that was the sole goal. Trudy is still a strong person, even if she does think that way.”

When people write about Mad Men, they are obliged to point out that the obsessive media coverage obscures the fact that viewership was never very high. Still, the show did register as a cultural phenomenon.

Community is much closer to being a genuine cult. Set among a group of students at a community college in Colorado, the show, which ran for six seasons, always struggled for ratings but, like similar subsonic shows such as Arrested Development, it picked up a modest, utterly fanatical following. If you've seen Community, you probably adore it.

“I think it’s a show about outsiders – about people who feel they don’t belong,” she says. “They are all underdogs. So our audience have been underdogs too. I also think when the show was on NBC they just didn’t promote it. They didn’t know what to do with it.”

There are upsides to cult status. As Brie remembers it, they ultimately felt no need to placate a wider audience.

“Oh we didn’t mind being a cult show. We revelled in being underdogs. We had a small group that really understood us. If you’re not on this train, you are never going to get on it. Season six was just for the hardcore fans. We loved that.”

Impact on film

Brie is now starting to make an impact on film. She will shortly appear opposite Gerard Butler in James Franco's The Disaster Artist, a study of the folk behind the notoriously terrible movie The Room.

Brie, Rainn Wilson, Dakota Johnson and Leslie Mann will also be teaming up for promising comedy How to Be Single.

Before then we get to enjoy the fine Sleeping with Other People. Leslye Headland's picture sends Brie clattering through a string of sexual complications in contemporary New York. The picture deals with obsession, irresponsibility and the new complexities of dating.

“It was a fun process. We sat around and discussed these things and discovered how the relationships echoed our own.”

Really? Have things gone this badly for Brie? “Ha, ha. My self-exploration here tended to do with unhealthy patterns I’d had with men I’d dated. It was the bad stuff rather than the good stuff. It was mostly to do with me thinking, God, I’ve dated a lot of jerks I stayed involved with too long because I felt that’s what I deserved in life. I was engaged then. So I had a sort of hindsight that helped.”

Yes, I had heard the happy news. Brie is engaged to Dave Franco, brother of the equally good-looking James, but they have yet to set a date. She’s done with jerks, then?

“That is all over, yes. That made the move not a painful business. I could reflect and think: that’s over.”

Next, Brie will be starring opposite Tom Hollander and Ian McShane in an adaptation of Anthony Trollope's Doctor Thorne for ITV. That, of course, takes her to England. But she remains stubborn in her passion for southern California.

“Yeah, I’m an LA girl,” she chortles. “But I’m bopping all over the world. Free as a bird.”

• Sleeping with Other People is out on January 1st