Taylor Swift may have turned her pen on him on “The Tortured Poets Department.”
But Joe Alwyn — who gets the ex treatment on the pop superstar’s blockbuster 2024 album — still has fond feels about collaborating with the singer during their six-year relationship.
Indeed, the British actor formed a fruitful pandemic partnership with Swift, co-writing songs on 2020’s “Folklore” (“Exile,” “Betty”) and its sister album “Evermore” (“Champagne Problems,” “Coney Island,” “Evermore”), as well as 2022’s “Midnights” (“Sweet Nothing”) — all under the pseudonym William Bowery.
Alwyn also served as a co-producer on “Folklore,” thus sharing in Swift’s Album of the Year Grammy win for the LP in 2021.
“Lockdown was a whole host of surprises and that was pretty special,” Alwyn, 33, told The Guardian about his creative collaboration with Swift. “That was not something I would have foreseen.”
Otherwise, though, Alwyn insists he has shaken off Swift, 35, after their 2023 breakup — just as she was beginning her epic Eras Tour.
When asked about moving on from the split, he said, “That’s something for other people to do. We’re talking about something that’s a while ago now in my life. So that’s for other people. That’s what I feel.”
Still, Alwyn — who currently stars in the Golden Globe-winning drama “The Brutalist” — has had to navigate tricky territory going through such a public breakup with one of the most famous women on the planet. But he never worried about it overshadowing his own career.
“I have tried just to focus on controlling what I can control,” he said. “And, right from the beginning, tried to focus on the things that are meaningful for me: friends, family, work, of course. So noise outside of that, I think I’ve done what lots of people who find themselves in the public eye do, which is just try and ignore it.
“If you don’t, and if you let all of that other stuff in, and if it starts to affect you and your behavior, you’re living from the outside in. And then you’re pretty f—ked.”
Although Alwyn has kept pretty quiet about his breakup with Swift, he opened up about it in the Sunday Times Style Magazine last year.
“I would hope that anyone and everyone can empathize 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,” said Alwyn, noting that he and Swift agreed to “keep the more private details of our relationship private” when they were together.
“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 … there is always going to be a gap between what is known and what is said. I have made my peace with that.”
