Joe Alwyn has a spring in his step. He’s freshly back from the Cannes Film Festival and looks every inch the off-duty, discreet movie star in his Loewe trousers and Bottega Veneta rubber trainers. “I feel like I could go rock climbing in these,” he says of his £710 shoes, adding that they were part of his Cannes wardrobe and crediting his stylist. “She helps with things like that because I’m incapable.”
Interviewing the Kent-born, London-raised actor is a tricky gig. He’s friendly, engaging and seems an all-round decent bloke who calls his mum and gives up his seat on the bus, but he’s also guarded and appears nervous to say anything that could be construed as even the slightest bit controversial. Clearly being the other half of the most famous woman in the world leaves its mark.
For more than six years, as the boyfriend of Taylor Swift, Alwyn was scrutinised by the online army of “Swifties” and the tabloid press. Every utterance, social media post or paparazzi picture was pored over, picked apart and pulled into a conspiracy theory vortex on a level of intrigue and hysteria typically reserved for the royal family. “I understand people’s curiosity,” he says, polite as a prince. Obviously I must ask about the Big Ex and her Big Album, but at the beginning we leave his relationship with the superstar — which ended in early 2023 — as an awkward elephant in the corner.
Thankfully what Alwyn actually wants to discuss is genuinely juicy: Yorgos Lanthimos’s brilliantly bonkers new movie, Kinds of Kindness. Three films within a film, it comprises 164 minutes of amputations, abuse, co-dependent relationships and cult madness. It made my head spin — what on earth does it all mean? “Anyone who can crack a Yorgos film overnight I applaud, and I’m not sure I have a fully articulated answer as to what it’s all about,” says Alwyn, who also starred in The Favourite, Lanthimos’s 2018 Oscar winner. “That’s one of the reasons I love his films — there’s so much ambiguity and they’re so wildly singular.”
For the past eight years the actor — all watery blue eyes and Princess Dianaesque hair — has quietly built up an impressive CV. After landing the lead part in Ang Lee’s war film Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2016) while in his early, pre-Taylor twenties, the work flowed in with films such as Boy Erased (2018), Harriet (2019) and The Souvenir: Part II (2021). In 2022 he came to wider attention, well beyond the Swift-sphere, with a lead role in Conversations with Friends, the BBC’s much-hyped Sally Rooney adaptation.
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Now Kinds of Kindness has won rapturous reviews. “It’s nice when people connect with things,” says Alwyn, 33, settling into a sofa at a hotel in central London. “I try and dial down what it is that people think, whether good or bad, because you can’t have one without the other.” He enjoyed his promotional turn at Cannes too: “It’s a bit of a circus, but that can be fun for a few days.”
The starry cast, which includes Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley, play different characters in each triptych. In the third triptych Alwyn is a single father trying to win back his wife (Emma Stone) from a cult. “Even though Yorgos really goes into dark corners in his work, he keeps a light atmosphere on set. It’s the second time I’ve worked with him and with Emily,” he says, calling Stone by her birth name. “I love them both and I love working with them, so it felt comfortable.” The scene includes Stone throwing up on Alwyn’s bare feet. “I think it was some kind of soup,” he says of the fake vomit. “Delicious!”
Lanthimos, the Greek film-maker also known for Poor Things (2023) and The Lobster (2015), gathers the cast together before filming for ice-breaking rehearsals. “Everyone’s rolling around playing silly games and humiliating themselves in front of each other in the very best way,” Alwyn says, adding that it reminded him of his time at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Maintaining a sense of fun on set stops him from falling into a trap of overthinking and fretting about the reaction to the film, as he’s done in the past. “If you start to think too much about all of those things that are outside your control, it ends up poisoning the thing you’re actually meant to like in the first place,” he says, sipping a flat white.
Emotionally letting go of matters outside his control is a recurring theme of our conversation. On coping with the beast of fame he says: “It’s something I try not to think about too much because it is beyond my control. I try and focus on the things in my life that are important, authentic and mean something to me. Everything that happens outside of that I can only do so much about.” Those important things are the obvious life-enhancers: “Friends, family, work you care about, people you love.”
• Kinds of Kindness review — sophisticated writing and perfect performances
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Coffees half-finished, it’s time to address the elephant. First, a speedy recap: Alwyn and Swift first met in 2016, reportedly at the Met Gala in New York, and — according to her 2019 hit London Boy — he introduced her to watching rugby in the pub, nights in Brixton, Hampstead Heath and, er, “high tea”. After her previous headline-grabbing romances with the likes of Tom Hiddleston and Calvin Harris, this was a more private affair. For example, when Alwyn co-wrote songs on her Folklore and Evermore 2020 albums, he did so under a pseudonym, William Bowery, to avoid frenzy (his work on the albums won him a Grammy and reported royalties). Last April, unexpectedly, the fairytale was over and their break-up was reported. By September Swift had begun a PDA-heavy, highly public relationship with Travis Kelce, the Kansas City Chiefs American football star.
Her new album, The Tortured Poets Department, released this April, seemingly nods to a WhatsApp group called The Tortured Man Club, which Alwyn shared with his fellow actors Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott. The track So Long, London is rumoured to be about their split. So, has Alwyn listened to the album? “In thinking on what I was going to say, I would think and hope that anyone and everyone can empathise … This isn’t a direct answer to your question, but just thinking about what I want to talk about …” he says, before restarting. “I would hope that anyone and everyone can empathise and understand the difficulties that come with the end of a long, loving, fully committed relationship of over six and a half years. That is a hard thing to navigate. What is unusual and abnormal in this situation is that, one week later, it’s suddenly in the public domain and the outside world is able to weigh in.”
Stern, eyes fixed on mine, he continues: “So you have something very real suddenly thrown into a very unreal space: tabloids, social media, press, where it is then dissected, speculated on, pulled out of shape beyond recognition. And the truth is, to that last point, there is always going to be a gap between what is known and what is said. I have made my peace with that.”
It seems that the actor has written his lines and learnt them by heart. It’s understandable because, in the feverish Swift universe, diehard fans have spewed countless conspiracy theories, including the unfounded rumours that the couple secretly married and that he cheated on her with a co-star. Cue abuse from the Swifties.
“As everyone knows, we together — both of us, mutually — decided to keep the more private details of our relationship private. It was never something to commodify and I see no reason to change that now,” Alwyn adds firmly. “And, look, this is also a little over a year ago now and I feel fortunate to be in a really great place in my life, professionally and personally. I feel really good.” Later I point out that, arguably, the reason to change tack is because Swift — who has 283 million Instagram followers — has released an album where some songs seemingly relate to their relationship unravelling. “Well, as I said, there’s always going to be a gap between what’s known and what’s said,” he repeats.
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It’s an extraordinary situation. On one hand you have the billion-dollar Taylor Swift machine, where an international tour gives a huge boost to economies around the world, one political post on social media can sway voter turnout in an election and an online behemoth is ready to attack perceived enemies. On the other you have a (relatively) regular Joe who, exiled from the machine post-break-up, seems only comfortable with sticking to a script. He won’t discuss whether he’s still in touch with his ex or whether he is dating again: “I’m sure you can appreciate, given the level of noise and scrutiny about my past relationship, why I wouldn’t want to just open the door to things like that right now,” he says.
Moving on to safer territory, he talks about how his friends are still largely the same group that he grew up with around Tufnell Park, north London. “I have brilliant, authentic people in my life,” Alwyn says. “I try and live in reality and away from the kind of online noise of Twitter — or wherever else it comes from — and try and just stay in the moment.”
He laughs off the idea that he’d have to go out in disguise (as Robert Pattinson once confessed to), but clearly avoids the Swift-related conspiracy nuttiness and trolling. “I try and dial that volume down. I was obviously made aware of it and think that mistreating anyone, whether it’s in person or behind the anonymity of a keyboard, is shameful.”
In real life, away from the online noise, Alwyn has a close-knit family for support. His parents, Richard and Elizabeth, a documentary maker and a psychotherapist respectively, sometimes look over scripts he is sent (“I really value their opinion”). He grins talking about his brothers; his younger sibling, Patrick, arrived when Alwyn was 12. “I loved it. It brought everyone together with a new energy,” he says, adding that his other brother, Tom, is only 18 months older than him so they fought endlessly growing up. “In a normal sibling way,” he quickly clarifies.
As a teenager Alwyn won a scholarship to the independent City of London School. His childhood sounds a happy mix of sport, playing in a band called Anger Management, family holidays to Cornwall and tentative forays into the acting world. In 2002 he auditioned to play the grieving boy in Love, Actually and remembers reading lines alongside a bloke called Hugh Grant, whom he vaguely recognised. The audition was during the World Cup: “I just wanted to get back and watch the football!” After studying English and drama at the University of Bristol he went to drama school, but left a few months early to join Ang Lee’s blockbuster Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, playing a Texan soldier suffering from PTSD. “A baptism by fire,” he recalls.
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Today, Alwyn’s film career seems steadily on the up. He’ll soon appear in a modern-day version of Hamlet, as Laertes, opposite Riz Ahmed, and in The Brutalist, a drama alongside Adrien Brody. “I would always want to be a part of something that is with interesting, creative people that I admire … If that’s in a supporting capacity, then great,” he says. “I’d rather do that than be the lead in something that my heart isn’t behind.” Having a stab at theatre at some point also appeals: “It would absolutely terrify me, but maybe that’s a good thing.”
Based in London and not tempted to move to Hollywood (he likes walking and thinks that driving everywhere “takes away some of the spontaneity of a day”), what does Alwyn’s happiest downtime look like when he’s not working? “It probably looks pretty similar to yours, or anyone’s — seeing friends, travelling, going to the pub,” he says, sounding uncomfortable. “Can I make a more boring list?” I joke that his chosen pub probably won’t be the Black Dog in Vauxhall, which Swift fans have deduced is the place name-checked in her new song, also called The Black Dog (“And so I watch as you walk/ Into some bar called The Black Dog/ And pierce new holes in my heart.”) Capitalising on this association, the pub has recently released merchandise: £50 hoodies, naff caps, tees and travel mugs. “I’ve never been to Vauxhall,” says Alwyn, smiling a smile that hints that there is more to say.
Before our goodbyes, talk turns to measuring success. Personal success, he says, is “being happy with who you are, with the people around you, being in a good space in your head, surrounding yourself with people you care about”. Is he in such a headspace? “Yes, I really am.” Heading out into the sunshine, spring still in his step, Alwyn seems to be focused forwards.
Kinds of Kindness is in cinemas from June 28
Styling: David Bradshaw. Grooming: Nadia Altinbas at C/O Management. Local production: Town Productions. Video: DOP and editor: Leo Element
