Joe Alwyn and Taylor Swift. Shutterstock (2)
An unexpected surprise. Joe Alwyn explained that he doesn’t often think of a girlfriend Taylor Swift‘s fame, so he certainly didn’t expect their fun musical collaboration to win a Grammy Award.
“That was a surreal bonus of lockdown. That’s an understatement,” the British actor, 31, told The Guardian in an interview published on Saturday April 30. It came about because I was playing around on a piano and singing badly, then being overheard and thinking, ‘Let’s see what happens when we finish this together.’”
Alwyn, aka William Bowery, wrote “Exile” and “Betty” for Swift’s Folklore, released July 2020, which won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in March 2021. He also wrote “Champagne Problems”, “Coney Island”. and the title track from Evermore, which she released in December 2020.
“I mean, fun is such a silly word, but it was a lot of fun,” he continued. “And it was never a work thing or ‘let’s try to do this because we’re going to put this out’ thing. It was like baking sourdough in lockdown. The Grammy was obviously this ridiculous bonus.”
The Grammy winner, who said he has no plans to write more hits, is focusing on acting. He will appear in the Hulu series Conversations With Friends, an adaptation of the Sally Rooney novel, as well as The Stars at Noon, a film slated to debut at the Cannes Film Festival later this year. He would much rather talk about his fictional characters’ private lives than his own.
Alwyn revealed he doesn’t philosophize too much about his life as the boyfriend of a legendary pop star. “I don’t think about it unless I’m in those situations and someone says, ‘How is it?’ and I have to think about what to say about that,” he told the Guardian. “It’s just not for other people and I don’t say that with aggression.”
He reiterated that their relationship is private. Since Alwyn and Swift began dating in 2016, the pair have kept their romance a secret, a decision the “All Too Well” singer opened up about in her 2020 Netflix documentary, Miss Americana.
“I fell in love with someone who had a wonderfully normal, balanced life,” she said in the film. “We decided together that our relationship should be private. I was happy. But I wasn’t as happy as I was raised to be happy. It was bliss without anyone else’s contribution. We were just happy.”
The couple rarely appear in public and avoid photographers when they do. The couple often attend the same premieres and awards shows to support each other, but they never walk the red carpet together. Alwyn told The Guardian that he was uncomfortable drawing attention to their romance.
“I don’t know how best to talk about it. I mean, I’m aware that people are… so interested and that this world exists. It’s just not something that I particularly care about or don’t have much interest in feeding, I guess, because the more it’s fed, the more you open a gate for intruders,” he said. “I think that’s just my reaction to a culture that has this increasing expectation that everything will be given. If you don’t post about how you make your coffee in the morning, or if you don’t let anyone take a picture when you walk out your front door, is that private? I don’t know if it is. So I just don’t really feed that.”
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