What Would You Like to Know?

An afternoon of pleasant negotiation with actor, stealth musician, and Taylor Swift muse Joe Alwyn.

- By Rachel Handler. Photograph by Radka Leitmeritz

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 or a blushing Brit from a bygone era. 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