“I never felt like I was lying down on the couch and being analysed every evening, which is probably a good thing. He actually grew up near where we are today, in Tufnell Park, a well-to-do neighbourhood in north London. Photograph: Blitz Pictures/Rex/Shutterstock ‘Our relationship is just not for other people’: with Taylor Swift in London, 2019. He’s quite aloof and enigmatic and unreadable.” “He can be a real enigma, and sometimes frustratingly so.
It isn’t until later in the series that we start to learn who he is. And he’s just kind of functioning, and we meet that version of him, but we don’t really know why,” Alwyn says. “When you meet him, he’s in a place of recovery – he’s been through a storm and is slightly numb to the world. Nick is certainly a complicated character who runs hot and cold, and he is difficult to pin down. But when Frances (newcomer Alison Oliver) and her best friend and ex-girlfriend Bobby (Sasha Lane) start to entangle themselves in their lives, the four of them are forced to ask grownup questions about love, jealousy and honesty. Nick is married to Melissa (Jemima Kirke), a successful writer, and their marriage has not always been monogamous. Which is a boring answer, I know.”Īnyway, this is a serious drama, not a bonkbuster, and it deals with serious themes. “I haven’t let myself think, ‘Oh God, people are actually going to see it’, so I haven’t thought about that side of things. They only finished filming four months ago. Normal People and Conversations With Friends are different stories, and different series, in many ways, but if his series follows the Mescal trajectory, is he prepared for the idea that he might become a pin-up? “I honestly just don’t have any thoughts about it,” he says. But, I mean, obviously, it’s a weird part of the job.” Each one, hopefully, should feel slightly different and mean something different to the people involved, and they’re not just kind of gratuitously thrown in. “They are kind of extensions of the conversations, in their own way. Clothes: īesides, he says, the sex scenes are there for a reason. ‘It felt really nice to have Sally Rooney’s blessing.’ Photograph: Elliott Wilcox/The Guardian. But when Lenny’s in the room, cracking jokes, and there’s 10 crew members around, and it’s freezing cold or boiling hot, it just takes all the sexiness out of it.” And obviously they’re weird, funny, strange things to do with your friends. “We were guided through it with an intimacy coordinator, Ita O’Brien, who is great,” he says. In Conversations With Friends, Nick has a heated affair with Frances, and Alwyn is fairly regularly, if tastefully, naked in it. “I read Normal People before I knew they were making a show out of it, and I remember when I saw it thinking, I’d love to be in something like that.” Normal People’s sex scenes between Connell (Paul Mescal) and Marianne (Daisy Edgar-Jones) became such a talking point that people began to lust over Mescal’s silver chain, as if everything else about him had been exhausted.
It just felt really nice to have her blessing.”Īlwyn had read Conversations With Friends and Normal People already, long before his involvement in the former. So how did you approach the pressure of emailing her? “Many, many drafts.
Thanks for the thumbs up, Sally.” Rooney’s books are full of highly articulate emails and texts. But I sent her an email just being like, ‘Thank you’, basically. The shoot was going to be in Dublin, where they planned to meet, but late in the day it moved to Belfast. She was involved in casting and watching tapes.” When he got the part, due to his soulfulness presumably, he contacted the author, and they exchanged a few emails. “I mean, not literally doing that, like a gladiator or an emperor. “I was told she was doing this and that,” he says, waggling a thumb up and down. Rooney had a say in who played her characters. I don’t know! So soulful,” he repeats, with a hint of embarrassment. The director of both, Lenny Abrahamson, said he cast Alwyn as Nick in part because he was “soulful”. The adaptation is the second of Sally Rooney’s novels to be made into a television series, after the lockdown-fuelled smash hit Normal People. Alwyn is about to star as Nick, the married, maudlin actor who has an affair with a student, Frances, in Conversations With Friends. He uses humour to deflect awkwardness, and I suspect it suits him that nobody can hear what we’re saying. For a while, we are the only people in the pub.