Joe Alwyn is opening up about his breakup with Taylor Swift for the first time, more than a year after news of their split made headlines in April 2023.
“I understand people’s curiosity,”Alwyn told the Sunday Times in an interview published June 15.
Alwyn, who stars in the upcoming Yorgos Lanthimos film "Kinds of Kindness," and Swift were in a relationship for more than "six and a half years," he told the outlet. Clarifying the timeline of their split, he said their breakup occurred "a little over a year ago." Outlets first reported the split on April 8, 2023.
Alwyn said the breakup has been "a hard thing to navigate."
Swift has since publicly moved on with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. But fans speculate her latest album, "The Tortured Poets Department," which dropped April 19, chronicled the end of her relationships with Alwyn and Matty Healy, who she was rumored to be dating beginning in May 2023. The album title also seemed to be a nod to the actor's WhatsApp group called The Tortured Man Club, which he shares with Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott.
When asked by the Sunday Times if he's listened to Swift's album, Alwyn didn't offer a "direct answer."
“In thinking on what I was going to say, I would think and hope that anyone and everyone can empathise … This isn’t a direct answer to your question, but just thinking about what I want to talk about …” he 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," he continued. "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.”
Alwyn said he's learned to make "peace" with how his relationship with Swift played out in the media, noting what really happened and how it was portrayed were very different.
“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," he said.
Alwyn and Swift kept their romance private over the course of the six-year relationship, which reportedly started in late 2016. In Swift's 2020 documentary "Miss Americana," Alwyn is referenced, though not named.
When the couple wrote songs together for her 2020 albums "Folklore" and "Evermore," Alwyn's involvement was initially kept a secret through the use of a pseudonym, William Bowery.
Their relationship faced speculation, including rumors that they had a secret wedding ceremony. (Swift's publicist, Tree Paine, shut down the lingering marriage rumors in November 2023, calling them "fabricated lies" in a post on X.)
Alwyn told the Sunday Times the decision to keep things private was mutual.
“As everyone knows, we together — both of us, mutually — decided to keep the more private details of our relationship private. It was never something to commodify and I see no reason to change that now,” Alwyn said.
Reflecting on the breakup now, Alwyn said he feels "fortunate to be in a really great place in my life, professionally and personally."
In regards to some of the songs on "The Tortured Poets Department" being about him, Alwyn reiterated: “There’s always going to be a gap between what’s known and what’s said."
One of those songs that fans have connected to Alwyn is "The Black Dog." The title refers to a pub in London and chronicles a narrator reminiscing about a relationship that has ended.
"I just don’t understand/ How you don’t miss me/ In The Black Dog/ When someone plays The Starting Line and you jump up/ But she’s too young to know this song/ That was intertwined in the magic fabric of our dreaming/ Old habits die screaming," Swift sings in the chorus.
A pub called The Black Dog in Vauxhall has capitalized on the attention, selling merchandise and renaming their menu items as Swifties descended on the location.
“I’ve never been to Vauxhall," Alwyn told the Sunday Times.
