The full-length trailer for Conversations with Friends is finally gracing our timelines - and reactions for it are mixed, to say the least.
The TV series, which is adapted from Sally Rooney’s bestselling book, sees Joe Alwyn take to the small screen as Nick, a bored failed actor who is married to Melissa (Jemima Kirke).
When the couple strike up a friendship with spoken-word poets – and university students – Frances and Bobbi (played by newcomer Alison Oliver and Sasha Lane), sparks fly and the four quickly become entangled in a web of lies and intimacy.
The trailer itself starts with Frances asking Bobbi, “Would it depress you to sleep with someone who loved someone else?”
“Not if they loved me too,” she responds.
“I thought maybe I was incapable of love, that there was something wrong with me,” Frances goes on to say. “That isn’t true.”
The trailer then goes on to show the burgeoning relationship between her and Nick, and how it goes onto affect all four of the main characters.
Despite hype for the show, reactions to the trailer have been mixed - with Joe Alwyn’s accent coming in for special scrutiny.
“ok Joe Alwyn’s accent is better than I was expecting,” one fan tweeted, while another gushed that “Joe Alwyn’s voice & accent guys. I can’t help but WOW!!!”
However, the view wasn’t all rosy.
“Joe alwyn has some nerve to show up with an Irish accent that heinous following Daisy Edgar Jones’ stellar accent in NP”, one disgruntled viewer wrote.
The show, which drops on BBC Three on May 15, was first announced this time last year by co-producer Ed Guiney and was filmed in Belfast and Dublin during lockdown.
"We’ve turned our attentions – we’re adapting Conversations with Friends as a television series. It’s the same basic team," Guiney said, referring to the Normal People crew.
"I love Conversations with Friends, its depth, humour and freshness, and it’s an honour to be involved in bringing it to the screen."
The official synopsis reads: “Frances (Alison Oliver) is twenty-one years old, cool-headed, and darkly observant. A college student and aspiring writer, she devotes herself to a life of the mind--and to the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi (Sasha Lane), her best friend and comrade-in-arms. Lovers at school, the two young women now perform spoken-word poetry together in Dublin, where a journalist named Melissa (Jemima Kirke) spots their potential.
“Drawn into Melissa’s orbit, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman’s sophisticated home and tall, handsome husband. Private property, Frances believes, is a cultural evil - and Nick (Joe Alwyn), a bored actor who never quite lived up to his potential, looks like patriarchy made flesh. But however amusing their flirtation seems at first, it gives way to a strange intimacy neither of them expect...”
