If – as projected – The Brutalist goes to the 2025 Academy Awards and cleans up, there will be some knowing, told-you-so nods from critics and industry experts. A monumental epic, the film has already earned comparisons to Citizen Kane and the Daniel Day-Lewis masterpiece There Will Be Blood. Over an engrossing three and a half hours, with an intermission, The Brutalist wrestles with the American dream, the vagaries of capitalism, the immigrant experience and antisemitism. Everyone agrees its lead, Adrien Brody, who already has a little gold statue, has never been better. The film is shot entirely on an obscure retro format, VistaVision, that hasn’t been used on an American movie since 1961. Tick, tick, tick, tick: textbook Oscar-bait.
Not that Joe Alwyn, 33, the British actor who also stars in The Brutalist sees it that way. “To be honest, I thought it might be a really good film that not many people would end up seeing,” he says, when we hunker down for a morning coffee at a hotel in central London. Alwyn is dressed entirely in dark blue; the only flashes of colour are the laces of his hiking boots. He’s over 6ft, but he slouches a little, so you wouldn’t immediately know. “Who knows, maybe it still will?” he continues. “I hope not. But given the things against it, given that it ticks most boxes of what you’re not meant to make as a film these days: length, content, all of that – anything on top of that is a really nice surprise.”
Alwyn goes on, warming to the subject. The Brutalist was made for less than $10m, loose change by modern standards, by a director, Brady Corbet, who is unknown outside Hollywood (and not exactly famous within it). It tracks the life of a fictional austere Bauhausian architect, which might float the boat of the Modern House devotees, but feels defiantly not very mainstream. Alwyn laughs, “A three-and-a-half-hour film about a Hungarian architect doesn’t scream Oppenheimer!”
So, if Alwyn had such profound doubts about the project… “Don’t do it?” he says, finishing the thought. “No, I don’t care, really. I want to, hopefully, be a part of interesting projects like that. I do think it’s a great film. I want to find those people to work with and I’m so happy to have found Brady.”
This exchange, in some ways, sums up Alwyn. In his career, he has found modest renown, often playing buttoned-up characters that he skilfully draws out with a slow-burn intensity. The template was set in his debut role, when he was picked out of nowhere – well, drama school – by director Ang Lee to star as the eponymous lead of the 2016 movie Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. Lynn is an American war hero, but also grappling with PTSD, and Alwyn portrayed him with a wide-eyed bemusement that he must also have been feeling. That sensitivity was there again in the BBC adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel Conversations with Friends in 2022. There, he is Nick, a depressed 30-something actor who stumbles into a messy affair with Frances, a self-absorbed college student.
But meanwhile, in Alwyn’s life off-screen, very little was quiet or subdued. Around 2016, he met Taylor Swift, probably at the Met Gala in New York, and they dated for six and a half years. As a couple, they fiercely guarded their privacy – Alwyn especially – but the diehard Swifties were never going to be fobbed off with that. Swift’s songs were pored over for biographical titbits, especially early hits Gorgeous, about becoming obsessed with a new boyfriend, and London Boy, where she roves around the city watching rugby in a pub and enjoying high tea. Even after their break-up in April 2023, the fascination endured: Swift’s latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, read as a pointed reference to a WhatsApp group that Alwyn had with actors Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott called, jokingly, The Tortured Man Club.
So, Alwyn knows fame – and also, the intense scrutiny and tedious perils that can accompany it. Perhaps for that reason, in his work, he has stealthily curated one of the more intriguing and challenging résumés of any modern British actor. Strikingly handsome, with a storm of blond hair and soulful blue eyes, he would be an obvious candidate for any romantic lead. But those parts don’t appear to interest him. Instead, he hunts down directors known for brilliant but offbeat films, such as Yorgos Lanthimos, Joanna Hogg, Claire Denis and Chloé Zhao. You imagine he would have the heft these days to insist on only central roles, but Alwyn quite often pops up in support of the likes of Emma Stone, Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie.
We saw this last year with Kinds of Kindness, the latest from Lanthimos, the director of The Favourite and Poor Things. (Kinds of Kindness, like The Brutalist, is also a whopper, with a runtime of almost three hours: “Two long films, but not too long films,” Alwyn notes.) Kinds of Kindness is a triptych fable with the same cast, including Stone, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, popping up in different scenarios. Alwyn’s most memorable sequence comes in the final third, where he plays an estranged husband, Joseph, whose wife (Stone) runs away from him and their daughter to join a cult. Joseph decides to spike her drink, for somewhat opaque and nefarious reasons, and she is promptly sick on his bare feet.
I tell Alwyn that his expression when the vomit splatters – beleaguered, accepting – really made me laugh. You can see he can’t tell whether I’m being genuine (I am!) and replies warily, “I’m glad that moment landed! Do you know what? That’s why I took the job. But cold pea soup on your foot is never a nice sensation, so that was pure Daniel Day-Lewis.”
In The Brutalist, Alwyn is Harry, the scion of a rich industrialist (played by Guy Pearce) who first commissions the architect László Tóth (Brody) to build a library for his father. He’s entitled and arrogant and, we slowly learn, probably much worse besides. “A bit of a wrong ’un, but quite an interesting wrong ’un,” says Alwyn. He found inspiration for Harry in unexpected places. “Look who’s the new president of America, and his family. Often family businesses are so insular and stunted and hollow. And you see it with Trump and his children: ‘I can do what I want.’ A convicted felon accused of sexual assault and grabbing them by the pussy and all of that. He’s unanswerable, unfortunately.”
Again, The Brutalist is a thoughtful choice for Alwyn: he is much more invested in collecting experiences and characters than pay cheques and star billing. “It feels like a no-brainer to seek out directors who I really admire and like, or just get along with, and see what that experience is like with them, whether that’s as a lead or a supporting role,” he says. “It hasn’t really bothered me.”
There it is once more: the hint that accruing more fame or celebrity is almost the last thing Alwyn wants.
Alwyn’s break came pretty young, but it could have been even earlier. In 2002, when he was 11, he was talent-spotted in a fencing class in north London – maybe the most middle-class detail ever – to audition for the part of Sam in the Richard Curtis movie Love Actually. He did well enough to run lines with members of the cast, but he mainly remembers wanting to get back to school to watch the World Cup.
“I didn’t audition for that because I was some child actor with an agent or something,” he says. “I just went to a fencing class because I was obsessed with Zorro growing up, so me and a friend started doing it in a community centre. But I was always quite shy. I wasn’t a theatre kid. I’m still not a theatre kid, I don’t think. There’s this idea that if you’re an actor, you’re jumping on a table and singing a song and telling every story. And, actually, the opposite is often true.”
Alwyn grew up in Kentish Town; his father Richard is a documentary filmmaker and lecturer, his mother Elizabeth is a psychotherapist. The connection between their lines of work and his own is not lost on Alwyn. “Both their jobs have a heavy interest in why people are the way they are,” he says. “And having empathy to explore someone or what makes us behave the way we do.”
Through his parents, Alwyn was introduced to classic films, from Kes to the Coen brothers. He was drawn to the subtler character actors: “Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Ben Whishaw was a big one as a teenager. I saw him as Hamlet when I was 13 or something, and probably not really understanding the play at all, but being like, ‘Whatever that is, that’s cool. I’ll have that.’” And Alwyn loved comedy. “There’s probably rarely a day in my life that goes by when I don’t think of The Office.”
Alwyn studied English and drama at Bristol university, before winning a place at the Central School of Speech and Drama. He was in his final year there when an agent took him on and put him forward for the new Ang Lee film. It would prove to be a life-changing moment. “It was completely mad,” Alwyn recalls. “And I feel really lucky. It’s not lost to me that I owe everything to him and that casting director. I really do. Every door that has opened is down to that. It was such a special experience. I’d never been to America. I’d never been in front of a camera before.”
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk was not a smash at the box office: nothing to do with Alwyn; it was just perhaps a bit too contemplative for what audiences were expecting from a war film. But he looks back on the experience with only fondness. “Everything about it was extreme: going to a new country, going to military boot camp, having your hair shaved off, doing an American accent, bulking up, everything was extreme. It’s still the most special experience of being a part of a project. I feel like I’ve been chasing that feeling since and have also simultaneously realised it’s not going to be the same, because that was the first ever time. And so it’s become coloured by other things and that’s OK as well.”
Is Alwyn talking about being in the public glare? “Yeah, that first time I had no idea about everything else that comes with it. That you have to do press for it and there’s expectations, or there’s not expectations. Or it could lead to this, or it won’t lead to this. All of that wasn’t there and that was great.”
Alwyn doesn’t make the link explicit, but everything changed after Billy Lynn not just because of the film, but mainly because he became half of one of the world’s most scrutinised couples. Did he fear that his relationship with Swift would overshadow his career? “I have tried just to focus on controlling what I can control,” he replies. “And, right from the beginning, tried to focus on the things that are meaningful for me: friends, family, work, of course. So noise outside of that, I think I’ve done what lots of people who find themselves in the public eye do, which is just try and ignore it. If you don’t, and if you let all of that other stuff in, and if it starts to affect you and your behaviour, you’re living from the outside in. And then you’re pretty fucked.”
That sounds exhausting, I suggest. “I have great family and friends and real things in my life; those are the things that kept me tethered to the ground,” Alwyn insists. “So I don’t know how else to say it, it’s… just in a different room.”
The apex of the fascination with Alwyn and Swift came in 2020 around the release of her albums Folklore, which won three Grammys, and its follow-up Evermore, conceived and made during lockdown. Alwyn has two writing credits on the former, three on the latter (under the pseudonym William Bowery): the transcendent, melancholic ballad Exile, from Folklore, which ended up as a duet with Bon Iver, came from Alwyn messing around on the piano and being overheard by Swift. “Lockdown was a whole host of surprises and that was pretty special,” says Alwyn. “That was not something I would have foreseen.”
He has a Grammy now – only an Emmy, Oscar and Tony and he’ll have an EGOT: “Yeah, I’ll just breeze through those,” he replies, wryly.
When I put it to Alwyn that he must just want to move on, he pushes back: he has moved on. “That’s something for other people to do,” he says. “We’re talking about something that’s a while ago now in my life. So that’s for other people. That’s what I feel.”
Certainly 2025 is looking bright for Alwyn. After The Brutalist, he has the two Hams: an adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, made by Chloé Zhao, one of only three women to have won an Oscar for Best Director, also starring Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley; and Hamlet, in which he is Laertes opposite Riz Ahmed’s Dane. Alwyn is always wary of speculating on an end product he hasn’t seen yet, but both projects fulfil his criteria of working with people he admires on scripts that somehow stop him in his tracks. “I always feel optimistic at the top of a new year,” he says. “No, I feel great, I feel lucky to be in a good place.”
For Alwyn, the dream is always to rediscover the time when nobody knew who he was or cared what he was doing beyond what was being projected on the screen. “You have to dupe yourself,” he says, of being an actor. “You have to fight away things in order to hold on to what is essentially a childlike playfulness. Bat away the industry of it. Or cynicism or self-consciousness, in order to put yourself in a place where you are willing to run around like a kid and pretend that you’re someone you’re not for a few months.” Alwyn snaps back to the real world and smiles, “Which sounds very sane.”
The Brutalist is in cinemas from 24 January
Fashion editor Helen Seamons; grooming by Paul Donovan using Patricks; fashion assistant Sam Deaman; photography assistants Tom Frimley and Claudia Gschwend
• This article was amended on 6 January 2025. An earlier version referred to Chloé Zhao as “one of only two women to have won an Oscar for Best Director”. In fact Zhao is one of three women to have done so -the others are Kathryn Bigelow and Jane Campion.
