‘What Would You Like to Know?’

The actor on starring in Hulu’s next Sally Rooney adaptation, Conversations With Friends,’ the celebrity stan industrial abyss, and writing ‘Folklore’ songs with Taylor Swift as ‘William Bowery.’

Joe Alwyn currently occupies one of the strangest spaces in the greater celebrity matrix. He’s not yet the sort of movie star your parents would recognize at the airport and text you about, nor does he have the box-office draw of a Chalamet or Pattinson, at least not yet. The 31-year-old has been working steadily in film and television since his straight-out-of-British-drama-school debut as the lead in Ang Lee’s 2016 high-def experiment Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. He racked up a series of well-received supporting roles in big period Oscar dramas and small critically appreciated indies, usually playing a Ken-doll-faced dick (Harriet, Operation Finale, Boy Erased, The Last Letter From Your Lover) or a blushing Brit from a bygone era (The Sense of an Ending, The Favourite, The Souvenir Part II, Mary Queen of Scots). Now, his first lead role since Billy, in Hulu’s second Sally Rooney adaptation, Conversations With Friends, threatens to make him fully Recognizable to Moms.

For a specific and rather substantial subset of the global population, however, Alwyn is not only a household name but a dinner-table centerpiece. To Google him is to stare straight into the stan-culture abyss. Lengthy YouTube videos are dedicated to his rare and rather unremarkable public interactions with his overwhelmingly famous longtime girlfriend — “Taylor Swift turns around to look at her boyfriend, Joe Alwyn, and sticks her tongue out at him” — or to the opaque references the two have made to the mere fact of each other’s existence. Breathless lists of “everything Taylor and Joe have said about their private relationship” abound in the Us Weekly universe. Alwyn is left to choose his words and body language wisely or risk their becoming permanent parts of the elaborate Swiftian canon. The man is not simply well-versed in the art of concealment; he is the Criss Angel of conversational dynamics. In interviews, he often demonstrates an ability to politely answer a question while revealing absolutely nothing about himself, sometimes even backtracking mid-answer to negate a benign detail. (From a recent piece in Mr. Porter: “Well, do you like football?” asks the reporter. “Football?” replies Alwyn. “Yeah. Am I allowed to say those kinds of things?”)

Yet he believes he has gotten better at the whole press thing over the years. “I don’t think I don’t enjoy interviews,” he says carefully. “I think I have seemed guarded.” He definitely “would like to not seem so guarded in them.” I can see those contradicting desires roiling inside Alwyn now, sitting across from him on the patio at Fairfax, in the West Village, for lunch. His energy is vaguely uncomfortable but determined, like that of someone preparing to swim laps in the English Channel in January to prove something to themselves. Perhaps sensing he has already revealed too much, he falls back on one of his tried-and-true lines: “If you were to ask a stranger on the street questions about their private life, let alone with the intent to then post it everywhere, why would that person not be like, ‘Sorry, what, why?’ So why would I not be like that?” He points at a woman sitting across the way from us who is, to my knowledge, not on a press tour. “I’m not going to go over there and ask that woman about her personal life.” “Actually, maybe you should,” I suggest. “I mean, I might do later,” he says, now looking cheered. “I’ll just holler across the street.”

Photo: TheImageDirect.com

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