Joe Alwyn never intended to be a songwriter.
The star of “Conversations with Friends” is on the new cover of GQ Hype, and inside he discusses his co-writing credit with girlfriend Taylor Swift on songs from her recent albums.
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“It was really the most accidental thing to happen in lockdown,” Alwyn says of songwriting. “It wasn’t like, ‘It’s three o’clock, it’s time to write a song!’ It was just messing around on a piano and singing badly and being overheard and then thinking, You know, what if we tried to get to the end of it together?”
Alwyn was credited under the pseudonym William Bowery on two songs from Swift’s 2020 album Folklore, and three more from her followup Evermore later that year.
“It was fun to do it together, and I was proud of it. It was nice getting such a positive reception,” he says, though he doesn’t have plans to write more music.
Talking about his role in “Conversations with Friends”, based on the popular novel from Normal People author Sally Rooney, Alwyn says, “I know it sounds slightly lame, but my only thought about it is that I hope people really like it.”
For the series, the 31-year-old English actor had to nail a very specific south Dublin accent to play the character of Nick.
“I listened to people like Andrew Scott and Tom Vaughan-Lawlor and that kind of middle-class south Dublin accent,” he says. “[Nick’s’] is quite anglicized, there was the idea that he would have been to drama school in London and he has a British wife and so maybe some of those sounds have been softened as well.”
Talking about his relationship with Swift and why he chooses to keep it private, Alwyn says, “I think because the precedent was set — that our choice is to be private and not feed that side of things. The more you do that, hopefully the more that intrusiveness or intrigue drops off.”
