“It wasn’t like, ‘It’s five o'clock, it’s time to try and write a song together.’ It came about from messing around on a piano, and singing badly, then being overheard, and being, like, 'Let’s see what happens if we get to the end of it together. [He liked it because there were no expectations and no pressure.] I mean fun is such a stupid word, but it was a lot of fun. And it was never a work thing, or a 'Let’s try and do this because we’re going to put this out’ thing. It was just like baking sourdough in lockdown. […] The Grammy was obviously this ridiculous bonus.“
— Joe Alwyn to The Guardian on working on folklore with Taylor
I like music, and I played a bit of guitar awfully in a school band [called Anger Management] when I was 12. I can play piano pretty badly, but never with the intent of, ‘Right, it’s time for my jazz-fusion album.’ Unfortunately.
He’s about to make you swoon in the new adaptation of the Sally Rooney blockbuster. The actor talks about earning the author’s seal of approval and winning a Grammy alongside Taylor Swift
The plan was to meet Joe Alwyn at an old‑fashioned pub in the area of London where he grew up. It’s a nice pub, tiny, a selection of beers with wacky names on tap, percentage proofs that would make your eyes water. But we both arrive just before noon, and the doors are locked, so we awkwardly hang around outside, peering in through the window, looking to all the world as though we are desperate for a late-morning drink.
I am not sure that Alwyn is as desperate to speak to me, though over the course of a slow and steady pint, he is very polite and easy company. The actor, 31, has been on the brink of being a big star ever since he left drama school in 2015, but his route to fame has run at a slightly different angle from his route to acting success. His partner is Taylor Swift, one of the most famous women on the planet, so there is that. He is tall, handsome, with floppy 90s heart-throb hair. He is quick and funny and confident, low-key in a fleece and jeans.
For a while, we are the only people in the pub. He uses humour to deflect awkwardness, and I suspect it suits him that nobody can hear what we’re saying. Alwyn is about to star as Nick, the married, maudlin actor who has an affair with a student, Frances, in Conversations With Friends. The adaptation is the second of Sally Rooney’s novels to be made into a television series, after the lockdown-fuelled smash hit Normal People. The director of both, Lenny Abrahamson, said he cast Alwyn as Nick in part because he was “soulful”. “What does that mean?” Alwyn splutters. You tell me, Joe. “I’ll take it. I don’t know! So soulful,” he repeats, with a hint of embarrassment.
Rooney had a say in who played her characters. “I was told she was doing this and that,” he says, waggling a thumb up and down. “I mean, not literally doing that, like a gladiator or an emperor. She was involved in casting and watching tapes.” When he got the part, due to his soulfulness presumably, he contacted the author, and they exchanged a few emails. The shoot was going to be in Dublin, where they planned to meet, but late in the day it moved to Belfast. “So we didn’t. But I sent her an email just being like, ‘Thank you’, basically. Thanks for the thumbs up, Sally.” Rooney’s books are full of highly articulate emails and texts. “She does a good email,” he nods. So how did you approach the pressure of emailing her? “Many, many drafts. I did my best email. It just felt really nice to have her blessing.”
Taylor Swift’s boyfriend of five-plus years Joe Alwyn may have been a secret co-writer on her albums Folklore and Evermore during the pandemic, using the pseudonym William Bowery, but don’t consider it the start of a prolific music career. Alwyn told ELLE in a new interview that he doesn’t see himself writing more songs with Swift—or anyone. “It’s not a plan of mine [to continue writing songs], no,” Alwyn said.
Nick is a quiet, aloof B-list actor in love with two women in the show: his wife Melissa (played by Jemima Kirke) and student Frances (played by Alison Oliver), with whom he begins an affair. The show explores love and open relationships.
“God, I don’t really know,” Alwyn said of personally relating to Nick. “I mean, there were ways I could initially relate to him. I’m not a married, 32-year-old Irishman having an affair, but I could relate to some of his anxieties and ups and downs—perhaps accounting from his profession, being an actor. Without turning this into a therapy session, I could relate to some of his depressive moods and struggles.”
“People who are outsiders in the one sense and can’t quite communicate what’s on the inside, I always like those characters,” he added. “It’s a quality in both of them that Frances is initially drawn to.”
Alwyn recently addressed why he doesn’t talk about Swift in interviews while talking to ELLE UK about Conversations With Friends. His not talking about Swift, “It’s not really [because I] want to be guarded and private, it’s more a response to something else,” he said with a shrug. “We live in a culture that is so increasingly intrusive… The more you give—and frankly, even if you don’t give it—something will be taken.”
