Joe Alwyn has reflected on his highly publicised relationship with Taylor Swift, and their subsequent split.
The actor, 33, who can next be seen alongside Emma Stone in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness, first met the pop superstar, 34, in 2016.
Alwyn and Swift then dated for six years, with Swift writing the 2019 song “London Boy” about him, and Alwyn co-writing tracks on her Folklore and Evermore albums under the pseudonym William Bowery.
Last April, the pair’s break-up made headlines, and by May there were rumours she was dating The 1975 frontman Matty Healy. But then in September, Swift started a highly public relationship with American football star for the Kansas City Chiefs, Travis Kelce.
The track “So Long, London” on Swift’s new album, The Tortured Poets Department, is rumoured to be about her split from Alwyn.
When asked by The Sunday Times’s Style Magazine in a new interview if he has listened to the album, Alwyn said: “I would hope that anyone and everyone can empathise and understand the difficulties that come with the end of a long, loving, fully committed relationship of over six and a half years. That is a hard thing to navigate.
“What is unusual and abnormal in this situation is that, one week later, it’s suddenly in the public domain and the outside world is able to weigh in.”
He continued: “So you have something very real suddenly thrown into a very unreal space: tabloids, social media, press, where it is then dissected, speculated on, pulled out of shape beyond recognition. And the truth is, to that last point, there is always going to be a gap between what is known and what is said. I have made my peace with that.”
Alwyn, who is known for his roles in BBC series Conversations with Friends and Lanthimos’s The Favourite, added that he and Swift “mutually decided to keep the more private details of our relationship private”, saying: “It was never something to commodify and I see no reason to change that now.”
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He said he is doing well. “And, look, this is also a little over a year ago now and I feel fortunate to be in a really great place in my life, professionally and personally. I feel really good.”
Alwyn opted not to discuss whether he is still in touch with Swift – who is currently taking her Eras Tour around the world – or whether he is dating again, saying: “I’m sure you can appreciate, given the level of noise and scrutiny about my past relationship, why I wouldn’t want to just open the door to things like that right now.”
On “London Boy”, Swift sang about how Alwyn introduced her to pastimes like watching rugby in the pub, Camden Market, nights in Brixton, drinking in the afternoon in Soho and Hampstead Heath.
Kinds of Kindness, according to its official synopsis, is a “triptych fable, following a man without choice who tries to take control of his own life; a policeman who is alarmed that his wife who was missing-at-sea has returned and seems a different person; and a woman determined to find a specific someone with a special ability, who is destined to become a prodigious spiritual leader”.
The film is out in the UK on 28 June, and stars Alwyn, Stone, Margaret Qualley, Jesse Plemons and Willem Dafoe.