Just in‘My Friends Keep Me Grounded’: Joe Alwyn Reflects on Fame, His Relationship with Taylor Swift, and Staying Humble”…See more

Just in‘My Friends Keep Me Grounded’: Joe Alwyn Reflects on Fame, His Relationship with Taylor Swift, and Staying Humble”…See more

If – as projected – The Brutalist goes to the 2025 Academy Awards and cleans up, there will be some knowing, told-you-so nods from critic 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.