20 | SATURDAY | 30.04.22 | The Guardian
H E PL A N WA S TO M E ET JOE A LW Y N 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 diff erent 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 fl oppy 90s heart-throb hair. He is quick
and funny and confi dent, low-key in a fl eece and jeans.
For a while, we are the only people in the pub. He uses
humour to defl ect 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 aff air with a student, Frances , in C onversations
With Friends. The adaptation is the se cond of Sally
R o o n e y ’s n o v e l s t o b e m a d e i n t o a t e l e v i s i o n s e r i e s , a f t e r
the lockdown-fuelled smash hit Normal People. The
director of both, Lenny Ab rahamson , 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
p r e s s u r e o f e m a i l i n g h e r? “ M a n y, m a n y d r a f t s. I d i d m y
b est em a i l. It ju st felt rea l ly n ice to h ave her bles si ng.”
Alwyn had read Conversations With Friends and
N o r m a l P e o p l e a l r e a d y, l o n g b e f o r e h i s i n v o l v e m e n t i n
the former. “I read Normal People before I knew they
were making a show out of it, and I remember when
I saw it thinking, I’d love to be in something like that.”
Normal People’s sex scenes between Connell ( Paul
Mescal ) and Marianne ( Daisy Edgar-Jones ) became such
a talking point that people began to lust over Mescal ’s
silver chain, as if everything else about him had been
exhausted. In Conversations With Friends, Nick has
a heated aff air with Frances, and Alwyn is fairly
regularly, if tastefully, naked in it. “ We were guided
through it with an intimacy coordinator, Ita O’Brien ,
who is great,” he says. “ They’re essentially choreo-
graphed. So they’re like fi ght scenes. They’re quite
mechanical. And obviously they’re weird, funny,
strange things to do with your friends. But whenL e n n y ’s i n t h e r o o m , c r a c k i n g j o k e s , a n d t h e r e ’s 1 0 c r e w
members around, and it’s freezing cold or boiling hot,
it just takes all the sexiness out of it.”
Besides, he says, the sex scenes are there for a reason.
“They are kind of extensions of the conversations,
in their own way. Each one, hopefully, should feel
slightly diff erent and mean something diff erent to the
people involved, and they’re not just kind of grat uitously
thrown in. But, I mean, obviously, it’s a weird part of
the job.”
Normal People and Conversations With Friends are
diff erent stories, and diff erent series, in many ways,
but if his series follows the Mescal trajectory, is he
prepared for the idea that he might become a pin-up?
“I honestly just don’t have any thoughts about it,” he
says. They only fi nished fi lming four months ago.
“ I h a v e n ’ t l e t m y s e l f t h i n k , ‘ O h G o d , p e o p l e a r e a c t u a l l y
going to see it’, so I haven’t thought about that side of
things. Which is a boring answer, I know.”
Anyway, this is a serious drama, not a bonkbuster,
and it deals with serious themes. Nick is married to
Melissa ( Jemima Kirke ), a successful writer, and their
marriage has not always been monogamous. But when
Frances (newcomer Alison Oliver ) and her best friend
and ex-girlfriend Bobby ( Sasha Lane ) start to entangle
themselves in their lives, the four of them are forced
to ask grown up questions about love, jealousy and
h onesty. Nick is certainly a complicated character
who runs hot and cold, and he is diffi cult to pin down.
“When you meet him, he’s in a place of recovery – he’s
been through a storm and is slightly numb to the
world. A nd he’s just k i nd of f u nc t ion i ng, a nd we meet
that version of him, but we don’t really know why,”
Alwyn says. It isn’t until later in the series that we start
to learn who he is. “He can be a real enigma, and some-
times frust ratingly so. He’s quite aloof and enigmatic
and unreadable.”
I am not sure that Alwyn is aloof, but he has more
than a touch of the enigmatic and unreadable about
him. He has been a steadily successful actor since 2016 ,
when his fi rst job was to star in the Ang Lee -directed
B i l l y L y n n ’ s L o n g H a l f t i m e W a l k , a l o n g s i d e K r i s t e n
Stewart. He followed it up with smaller roles in a series
of award-winning fi lms, including The Favourite ,
Mary Queen of Scots, and Harriet. He has fronted
campaigns for Prada, and has also won a Grammy , after
collaborating with Swift on her 2020 album Folklore.
Despite all of this, I say, I don’t know very much about
you. Few details of his life are public, which he seems▶ Alwyn and his girlfriend
Taylor Swift in London,
2019: ‘Our relationship is
just not for other people’ BLITZ PICTURES/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK