If – as projected – The Brutalist goes to the 2025 Academy Awards and cleans up, there will likely be some figuring out, told-you-so nods from critics and business specialists. A monumental epic, the movie 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 expertise and antisemitism. Everybody agrees its lead, Adrien Brody, who already has just a little gold statue, has by no means been higher. The movie is shot fully on an obscure retro format, VistaVision, that hasn’t been used on an American film since 1961. Tick, tick, tick, tick: textbook Oscar-bait.
Not that Joe Alwyn, 33, the British actor who additionally stars in The Brutalist sees it that method. “To be sincere, I assumed it may be a very good movie that not many individuals would find yourself seeing,” he says, once we hunker down for a morning espresso at a resort in central London. Alwyn is dressed fully in darkish blue; the one flashes of color are the laces of his mountaineering boots. He’s over 6ft, however he slouches just a little, so that you wouldn’t instantly know. “Who is aware of, perhaps it nonetheless will?” he continues. “I hope not. However given the issues in opposition to it, on condition that it ticks most packing containers of what you’re not meant to make as a movie as of late: size, content material, all of that – something on prime of that could be a very nice shock.”
Alwyn goes on, warming to the topic. The Brutalist was made for lower than $10m, unfastened change by trendy requirements, by a director, Brady Corbet, who’s unknown outdoors Hollywood (and never precisely well-known inside it). It tracks the lifetime of a fictional austere Bauhausian architect, which could float the boat of the Trendy Home devotees, however feels defiantly not very mainstream. Alwyn laughs, “A 3-and-a-half-hour movie a few Hungarian architect doesn’t scream Oppenheimer!”
So, if Alwyn had such profound doubts concerning the undertaking… “Don’t do it?” he says, ending the thought. “No, I don’t care, actually. I wish to, hopefully, be part of fascinating tasks like that. I do suppose it’s an excellent movie. I wish to discover these individuals to work with and I’m so completely satisfied to have discovered Brady.”
This trade, in some methods, sums up Alwyn. In his profession, he has discovered modest renown, usually enjoying buttoned-up characters that he skilfully attracts out with a slow-burn depth. The template was set in his debut position, when he was picked out of nowhere – effectively, drama college – by director Ang Lee to star because the eponymous lead of the 2016 film Billy Lynn’s Lengthy Halftime Stroll. Lynn is an American struggle hero, but additionally grappling with PTSD, and Alwyn portrayed him with a wide-eyed bemusement that he should even have been feeling. That sensitivity was there once more within the BBC adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel Conversations with Mates in 2022. There, he’s Nick, a depressed 30-something actor who stumbles right into a messy affair with Frances, a self-absorbed school scholar.
However in the meantime, in Alwyn’s life off-screen, little or no was quiet or subdued. Round 2016, he met Taylor Swift, most likely on the Met Gala in New York, they usually dated for six and a half years. As a pair, they fiercely guarded their privateness – Alwyn particularly – however the diehard Swifties have been by no means going to be fobbed off with that. Swift’s songs have been pored over for biographical titbits, particularly early hits Attractive, about changing into obsessive about a brand new boyfriend, and London Boy, the place she roves across the metropolis watching rugby in a pub and having fun with excessive tea. Even after their break-up in April 2023, the fascination endured: Swift’s newest album, The Tortured Poets Division, learn as a pointed reference to a WhatsApp group that Alwyn had with actors Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott known as, jokingly, The Tortured Man Membership.
So, Alwyn is aware of fame – and in addition, the extraordinary scrutiny and tedious perils that may accompany it. Maybe for that purpose, in his work, he has stealthily curated one of many extra intriguing and difficult résumés of any trendy British actor. Strikingly good-looking, with a storm of blond hair and soulful blue eyes, he could be an apparent candidate for any romantic lead. However these elements don’t seem to curiosity him. As a substitute, he hunts down administrators recognized for good however offbeat movies, resembling Yorgos Lanthimos, Joanna Hogg, Claire Denis and Chloé Zhao. You think about he would have the heft as of late to insist on solely central roles, however Alwyn very often pops up in help of the likes of Emma Stone, Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie.
We noticed this final yr with Sorts of Kindness, the most recent from Lanthimos, the director of The Favorite and Poor Issues. (Sorts of Kindness, like The Brutalist, can be a whopper, with a runtime of just about three hours: “Two lengthy movies, however not too lengthy movies,” Alwyn notes.) Sorts of Kindness is a triptych fable with the identical solid, together with Stone, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, popping up in numerous eventualities. Alwyn’s most memorable sequence comes within the closing third, the place he performs an estranged husband, Joseph, whose spouse (Stone) runs away from him and their daughter to affix a cult. Joseph decides to spike her drink, for considerably opaque and nefarious causes, and she or he is promptly sick on his naked toes.
I inform Alwyn that his expression when the vomit splatters – beleaguered, accepting – actually made me snicker. You’ll be able to see he can’t inform whether or not I’m being real (I’m!) and replies warily, “I’m glad that second landed! Have you learnt what? That’s why I took the job. However chilly pea soup in your foot is rarely a pleasant sensation, in order that was pure Daniel Day-Lewis.”
In The Brutalist, Alwyn is Harry, the scion of a wealthy industrialist (performed by Man Pearce) who first commissions the architect László Tóth (Brody) to construct a library for his father. He’s entitled and boastful and, we slowly study, most likely a lot worse moreover. “A little bit of a unsuitable ’un, however fairly an fascinating unsuitable ’un,” says Alwyn. He discovered inspiration for Harry in surprising locations. “Look who’s the brand new president of America, and his household. Usually household companies are so insular and stunted and hole. And also you see it with Trump and his kids: ‘I can do what I need.’ A convicted felon accused of sexual assault and grabbing them by the pussy and all of that. He’s unanswerable, sadly.”
Once more, The Brutalist is a considerate alternative for Alwyn: he’s far more invested in gathering experiences and characters than pay cheques and star billing. “It looks like a no brainer to hunt out administrators who I actually admire and like, or simply get together with, and see what that have is like with them, whether or not that’s as a lead or a supporting position,” he says. “It hasn’t actually bothered me.”
There it’s as soon as extra: the trace that accruing extra fame or movie star is nearly the very last thing Alwyn desires.
Alwyn’s break got here fairly younger, however it might have been even earlier. In 2002, when he was 11, he was talent-spotted in a fencing class in north London – perhaps probably the most middle-class element ever – to audition for the a part of Sam within the Richard Curtis film Love Really. He did effectively sufficient to run strains with members of the solid, however he primarily remembers desirous to get again to high school to look at the World Cup.
“I didn’t audition for that as a result of I used to be some youngster actor with an agent or one thing,” he says. “I simply went to a fencing class as a result of I used to be obsessive about Zorro rising up, so me and a good friend began doing it in a group centre. However I used to be at all times fairly shy. I wasn’t a theatre child. I’m nonetheless not a theatre child, I don’t suppose. There’s this concept that when you’re an actor, you’re leaping on a desk and singing a track and telling each story. And, truly, the other is commonly true.”
Alwyn grew up in Kentish City; his father Richard is a documentary filmmaker and lecturer, his mom Elizabeth is a psychotherapist. The connection between their strains of labor and his personal is just not misplaced on Alwyn. “Each their jobs have a heavy curiosity in why individuals are the way in which they’re,” he says. “And having empathy to discover somebody or what makes us behave the way in which we do.”
By way of his mother and father, Alwyn was launched to traditional movies, from Kes to the Coen brothers. He was drawn to the subtler character actors: “Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Ben Whishaw was an enormous one as an adolescent. I noticed him as Hamlet after I was 13 or one thing, and doubtless probably not understanding the play in any respect, however being like, ‘No matter that’s, that’s cool. I’ll have that.’” And Alwyn liked comedy. “There’s most likely hardly ever a day in my life that goes by after I don’t consider The Workplace.”
Alwyn studied English and drama at Bristol college, earlier than successful a spot on the Central Faculty of Speech and Drama. He was in his closing yr there when an agent took him on and put him ahead for the brand new Ang Lee movie. It could show to be a life-changing second. “It was fully mad,” Alwyn recollects. “And I really feel actually fortunate. It’s not misplaced to me that I owe the whole lot to him and that casting director. I actually do. Each door that has opened is all the way down to that. It was such a particular expertise. I’d by no means been to America. I’d by no means been in entrance of a digital camera earlier than.”
Billy Lynn’s Lengthy Halftime Stroll was not a smash on the field workplace: nothing to do with Alwyn; it was simply maybe a bit too contemplative for what audiences have been anticipating from a struggle movie. However he appears again on the expertise with solely fondness. “All the things about it was excessive: going to a brand new nation, going to navy boot camp, having your hair shaved off, doing an American accent, bulking up, the whole lot was excessive. It’s nonetheless probably the most particular expertise of being part of a undertaking. I really feel like I’ve been chasing that feeling since and have additionally concurrently realised it’s not going to be the identical, as a result of that was the primary ever time. And so it’s grow to be colored by different issues and that’s OK as effectively.”
Is Alwyn speaking about being within the public glare? “Yeah, that first time I had no concept about the whole lot else that comes with it. That you need to do press for it and there’s expectations, or there’s not expectations. Or it might result in this, or it received’t result in this. All of that wasn’t there and that was nice.”
Alwyn doesn’t make the hyperlink express, however the whole lot modified after Billy Lynn not simply due to the movie, however primarily as a result of he grew to become half of one of many world’s most scrutinised {couples}. Did he worry that his relationship with Swift would overshadow his profession? “I’ve tried simply to give attention to controlling what I can management,” he replies. “And, proper from the start, tried to give attention to the issues which are significant for me: associates, household, work, after all. So noise outdoors of that, I believe I’ve executed what tons of people that discover themselves within the public eye do, which is simply try to ignore it. In the event you don’t, and when you let all of that different stuff in, and if it begins to have an effect on you and your behaviour, you’re dwelling from the surface in. And then you definitely’re fairly fucked.”
That sounds exhausting, I recommend. “I’ve nice household and associates and actual issues in my life; these are the issues that saved me tethered to the bottom,” Alwyn insists. “So I don’t know the way else to say it, it’s… simply in a special room.”
The apex of the fascination with Alwyn and Swift got here in 2020 across the launch of her albums Folklore, which received three Grammys, and its follow-up Evermore. Conceived and made throughout lockdown, Alwyn has two writing credit on the previous, three on the latter (below the pseudonym William Bowery): the transcendent, melancholic ballad Exile, from Folklore, which ended up as a duet with Bon Iver, got here from Alwyn messing round on the piano and being overheard by Swift. “Lockdown was a complete host of surprises and that was fairly particular,” says Alwyn. “That was not one thing I might have foreseen.”
He has a Grammy now – solely an Emmy, Oscar and Tony and he’ll have an EGOT: “Yeah, I’ll simply breeze via these,” he replies, wryly.
After I put it to Alwyn that he should simply wish to transfer on, he pushes again: he has moved on. “That’s one thing for different individuals to do,” he says. “We’re speaking about one thing that’s some time in the past now in my life. In order that’s for different individuals. That’s what I really feel.”
Definitely 2025 is wanting vibrant for Alwyn. After The Brutalist, he has the 2 Hams: an adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, made by Chloé Zhao, considered one of solely two girls to have received an Oscar for Greatest Director, additionally starring Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley; and Hamlet, through which he’s Laertes reverse Riz Ahmed’s Dane. Alwyn is at all times cautious of speculating on an finish product he hasn’t seen but, however each tasks fulfil his standards of working with individuals he admires on scripts that one way or the other cease him in his tracks. “I at all times really feel optimistic on the prime of a brand new yr,” he says. “No, I really feel nice, I really feel fortunate to be in an excellent place.”
For Alwyn, the dream is at all times to rediscover the time when no one knew who he was or cared what he was doing past what was being projected on the display. “You need to dupe your self,” he says, of being an actor. “You need to struggle away issues with a purpose to maintain on to what’s basically a childlike playfulness. Bat away the business of it. Or cynicism or self-consciousness, with a purpose to put your self in a spot the place you’re keen to run round like a child and faux that you just’re somebody you’re not for a couple of months.” Alwyn snaps again to the true world and smiles, “Which sounds very sane.”
The Brutalist is in cinemas from 24 January
Style editor Helen Seamons; grooming by Paul Donovan utilizing Patricks; trend assistant Sam Deaman; pictures assistants Tom Frimley and Claudia Gschwend
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