Joe Alwyn’s dream scenario was that just maybe after drama school he’d land a small theatre role at the Young Vic, or at best The Old Vic. Yet before he finished the course, and only a few weeks after getting an agent, he got the chance to audition for the lead role in Ang Lee’s latest film, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, about a heroic US marine reliving past trauma in Iraq. His co-stars were Kristen Stewart, Vin Diesel and Steve Martin. Before his audition tape was seen, he got a call: Lee would instead like to meet him in New York. It was the first time Alwyn had even been to America. “I literally left school and they put me on a plane.”
He wore every possible layer of clothing – partly due to the cold (it was snowing) and partly to bulk up his skinny frame to look more like a marine. It didn’t quite work: at the end of the audition they asked to see him in just his T-shirt. “You know, I was, like, skinny, long-haired, British...”
Yet two nights in the States turned into ten days. He flew to Atlanta to audition on set – the first he’d ever set foot on – and spent his 24th birthday there. They got him a cake, then Lee gave him the part. “It was... definitely unusual.”
Perhaps just as ridiculous, for the now 27-year-old, is that since Billy Lynn in 2016, Alwyn has appeared in five major films, four of which are out in the next few months. Oh, and did we mention he’s the current Mr Taylor Swift?
Not long after Billy Lynn and his role alongside Jim Broadbent and Emily Mortimer in The Sense Of An Ending, he landed The Favourite, a costume drama from the surrealist director of The Lobster, in which he says lines such as, “I should have you stripped and whipped!” to Emma Stone (Stone: “I’m waiting”). Then he plays Queen Elizabeth I’s lover in Mary Queen Of Scots – the Queen is played by Margot Robbie – written by the creator of Netflix’s House Of Cards. Next is Boy Erased with Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe playing a couple who send their son to gay conversion therapy (“Something I didn’t know a lot about and you have Mike Pence believing those insane, crazy places”) and in which Alwyn plays the son’s friend. Then Operation Finale, as the son of Sir Ben Kingsley’s Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi who masterminded the Holocaust.
All of which isn’t bad for someone whose sole acting experience before Billy Lynn was, as a child, auditioning for the part of Liam Neeson’s son in Love Actually (“I remember reading some scenes with Hugh Grant and Richard Curtis”).
Working with Kingsley, he says, was a particularly interesting experience, in that he didn’t speak to him.
“I’ve never been on set with someone who didn’t make contact with anyone else and just wanted to stay in their own mental headspace and in their own zone. It was interesting to watch... and also slightly intimidating. But it suited the film. Eichmann’s son loves him but is fearful of him, so it played into that.”
Google Alwyn’s name and you’ll fall into a Taylor Swift-shaped internet vortex, with fan theories rivalling the complexity of Roswell and QAnon picking the relationship apart. The most accepted theories floating around in the Swiftverse being: they first met at the 2016 Met Gala (fans think the track “Dress”, referring to “your buzzed cut” hair, is about his solider-short trim at the time); Emma Stone later set them up; that last year’s “Ready For It” video refers to their years of birth (the “89” and “91” spray-painted on a wall at the start); and that from her “Delicate” video earlier this year, she spells out “Joe” via dancing.
So, for the sake of internet fansites, some fresh meat: his favourite TV show (“The Bridge, but not all-time favourite”); film (“On The Waterfront... or Boogie Nights. I like Paul Thomas Anderson a lot”); and music (“I like rap music. Lykke Li I like a lot”). At school he was sporty – tennis, athletics, football, rugby – loving the latter until he ripped his shoulder muscles (“They never recovered”). He used to support Chelsea, but “I don’t care much about football any more. I’ve gone off it.”
Most telling is his choice of actor – he loves Mark Rylance and Marlon Brando, but his favourite is Ben Whishaw, who, at 37, is only ten years his senior.
“I think it’s tied to the fact I saw him on stage when he was just out of Rada,” he says. “I remember seeing him be Hamlet – I was 14 and thought, ‘I want to do that...’”
Talking of his much-noted private life, he says, “Someone’s private life is, by definition, private. No one is obliged to share their personal life”, which, of course, is fair enough.
But what, I ask, of the dual Instagram shots – on both his and Swift’s accounts of the same desert cactus at the same time? Wasn’t that sending a message?
“No. I didn’t even think of that until I was in New York and someone else mentioned it.” So it wasn’t on purpose? “No, no! It wasn’t purposeful at all!”
The Swift-centred gossip sites will tell you Alwyn still lives at home, with his parents in Tufnell Park, North London. This, he says, is no longer the case (“I mean, I still go there”). But when I ask if this means he has his own place, he demurs, simply saying his parents’ house is “not his base”. Swift, according to reports, has rented a house in the area. Does he still live in North London? “I mean, obviously I’m not going to say exactly where, but yeah.”
The attention has led, naturally, to tabloid scrutiny, with a former classmate describing Alwyn to the Daily Mail as “a quintessential panty-dropper”. What did he think when he read that?
He smiles wanly. “All I will say is that he called me after that, apologising, not realised he’d been tricked by the tabloids.”
Before I depart, I ask a final question. Favourite Swift song?
He laughs. “I’m just not even going to go into that side of the world.” That night, they’ll be snapped hand in hand on a date – fair to say, he already is.
Operation Finale is out now; The Favourite is out on 1 January 2019; Mary Queen Of Scots is out on 18 January 2019; Boy Erased is out on 8 February 2019
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