Joe Alwyn is the rare leading man who manages to navigate his fair way out of the blinding glare of stardom. In the seven years since Academy Award-winning director Ang Lee tapped Alwyn, then an actor at London’s Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, to play the lead role in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Alwyn chose his roles with the discernment of someone who is much more interested in being in the right place than everywhere at once. As the 31-year-old British actor awaits the release of Conversations with friendshowever, his days among normal people are numbered.
Conversations with friends is the TV adaptation of the debut novel by Sally Rooney, the young Irish writer whose millennial fairy tales are steeped in socialist politics, sadness and sex, and have sold millions of copies. Conversations, which published in 2017 and catapulted the then unknown writer to cult status as a “great millennial author”, is the sunniest of her works. Alwyn plays Nick Conway, a married actor who is the only male member of a thoroughly modern love quadrangle. While the adaptation, which will premiere on Hulu in May, doesn’t take many liberties with the story’s choreography, it does breathe new life into Rooney’s pared-back prose.
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