Joe Alwyn, the Actor Lanthimos and Corbet Keep Casting Beside the Lead

Joe Alwyn

Photo: Greg2600 / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 21, 1991 Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England, UK
Occupation	Actor
Known for	The Favourite, Hamnet, The Brutalist
Awards	Grammy · Trophée Chopard, Cannes Film Festival

Joe Alwyn tends to stand in the second row of the frame. In The Favourite he was the young courtier Emma Stone‘s Abigail sets out to marry; in The Brutalist he was the industrialist’s heir who looks down on Adrien Brody‘s architect; in Hamnet he is Bartholomew, the steady brother of Jessie Buckley‘s Agnes. Directors with a reputation for being hard to please, Yorgos Lanthimos and Brady Corbet among them, keep calling him back for the part next to the lead. His most widely heard credit carries a different name altogether: William Bowery.

That position has been a choice as much as a sentence. For most of a decade Alwyn was also the most photographed plus-one in pop music, and the attention rarely reached the work. The slate he has lined up now asks a plainer question: whether an actor who turned withholding into a method can hold the centre of the frame on his own. A le Carré spy, a Sam Esmail thriller, a witch-finder and the romantic lead of a New York comedy are about to find out.

The reticence started early. Joseph Matthew Alwyn arrived in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, in February 1991 and grew up in North London, the son of a psychotherapist and a documentary filmmaker, and the great-grandson of the composers William and Olive Alwyn. He has described himself as an introverted child who still knew he wanted to act. He auditioned for a small part in Love Actually and did not get it, joined the National Youth Theatre in his late teens and read English literature and drama at the University of Bristol, where he took two student productions to the Edinburgh Fringe.

Drama school came next, at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London. In his third year an agent saw him in a student showcase, and within months he had the title role in Ang Lee’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, as a young American soldier paraded through a football halftime show back home. It was his first feature and his first trip to the United States. Lee said he cast him for his ability to carry the novel’s paradox of war in his face alone.

What followed was a long run of costume. In 2018 he played Samuel Masham for Lanthimos in The Favourite, Robert Dudley, Elizabeth I’s favourite, in Mary Queen of Scots, and smaller parts in Operation Finale and Joel Edgerton‘s Boy Erased. That May the Cannes Film Festival gave him the Trophée Chopard, its prize for emerging actors, shared with Elizabeth Debicki. A year later he was the slaveholder Gideon Brodess in Harriet and Bob Cratchit in the BBC and FX version of A Christmas Carol.

The leading parts, when they came in 2022, were quieter. In the BBC and Hulu adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends he played Nick Conway, a married actor drawn into an affair with a student, across twelve episodes. In Claire Denis’s Stars at Noon, which shared the Grand Prix at Cannes, he was the evasive English businessman opposite Margaret Qualley in Nicaragua. Lena Dunham gave him a comic turn as a medieval uncle in Catherine Called Birdy.

The credit that reached the largest audience was not under his own name. During his relationship with Taylor Swift, which ran from 2016 to 2023, Alwyn co-wrote “Exile” and “Betty” as William Bowery and co-produced six songs on Folklore, the record that won Album of the Year at the Grammys in 2021. He later explained the pseudonym to The Wall Street Journal: William for his great-grandfather, Bowery for the New York neighbourhood where he spent much of his time when he first reached the city. Further co-writes followed on Evermore and on “Sweet Nothing” from Midnights.

Here the public story and the work pull apart. The tabloid version made him a footnote in someone else’s catalogue, and his own reserve did little to correct it; he has called his privacy a knee-jerk response to the culture he works in, and silence, in that culture, sells as mystery. The casting record has a narrower problem. Look at the men he has been asked to play: a courtier, a royal favourite, a slaveholder, an industrialist’s heir, Laertes. Directors reach for him when they need privilege that is polite on the surface and cold underneath. It is a precise instrument. It is also a box.

The last two years widened it. He went back to Lanthimos for the triptych Kinds of Kindness and played Harry Lee Van Buren in Corbet’s The Brutalist. In 2025 he made his professional stage debut at the Bridge Theatre in London as Heath in a modern version of Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea, opposite Alicia Vikander and Andrew Lincoln, and earned a WhatsOnStage nomination for it. Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet collected eight Oscar nominations, and Buckley won best actress. In Aneil Karia’s modern-dress Hamlet, released in British cinemas in February 2026, he is Laertes to Riz Ahmed‘s prince.

The slate ahead is the largest he has had. In Legacy of Spies, the eight-part BBC and MGM+ adaptation of John le Carré that wrapped in September, he plays Jim Prideaux, the field agent whose off-book missions unsettle London, with Matthew Macfadyen as George Smiley and Hugh Laurie as Control. Sam Esmail’s paranoid thriller Panic Carefully, with Julia Roberts and Elizabeth Olsen, is due in cinemas through Warner Bros. on 9 April 2027. He has also signed for Tomas Alfredson’s Séance on a Wet Afternoon with Rachel Weisz and Matthew Macfadyen, for the 1645 witch-hunt thriller Cavendish as the fanatical witch-finder Barlow, and for The Husbands, the A24 series for Apple TV in which he is one of the many spouses who keep appearing in Juno Temple’s attic.

Two projects point in opposite directions. Corbet’s The Origin of the World, a period western with Cate Blanchett, Selena Gomez and Michael Fassbender, began shooting on 65mm film in September: the auteur pipeline, once more. This autumn in New York he also becomes Isaac in Still We Met, a romantic comedy written by and starring Mary Beth Barone and directed by Zackary Drucker, about a British stranger and a woman who spend one night walking the city. After ten years beside the lead, Isaac is the rare Alwyn role with nobody standing in front of him.

Featured Films

Tags: actors, Yorgos Lanthimos, The Brutalist, Hamnet, Joe Alwyn, Legacy of Spies, The Favourite

Related People

Jessie Buckley

Will Arnett

Theo James

Jessica Biel

Jamie Bell

John Goodman