An unexpected surprise. Joe Alvin explained that he doesn’t often think about the fame of his girlfriend Taylor Swift, so he certainly didn’t expect their hilarious musical collaboration to win a Grammy Award.
“It was a surreal blocking bonus. This is an understatement,” the 31—year-old British actor told The Guardian in an interview published on Saturday, April 30. “It wasn’t like, ‘five o’clock, it’s time to try to write a song together.’ about sitting around on the piano and singing badly, then being overheard and saying, “Let’s see what happens if we get to the end together.”
Alvin, known as William Bowery, co-wrote the songs “Exile” and “Betty” for Swift’s Folklore album, released in July 2020 and won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in March 2021. He also co-wrote the songs “Problems with Champagne”, “Coney Island”. and the title track Evermore, which she released in December 2020.
“I mean, fun is such a silly word, but it was a lot of fun,” he continued. “And it’s never been a job or ‘Let’s try to do this because we’re going to release this.’ It was like baking sourdough in isolation. The Grammys were obviously this ridiculous bonus.”
The Grammy winner, who said he has no plans to write more hits, is focused on acting. He is set to star in the Hulu series Conversations with Friends, an adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel, as well as in the movie Stars at Noon, which debuts at the Cannes Film Festival later this year. He would rather talk about the personal lives of his fictional characters than about his own.
Alvin revealed that he doesn’t philosophize too much about his life as the boyfriend of a cult pop star. “I don’t think about it unless I’m in situations like this and someone says, ‘What does it feel like?’ and I have to think what to say about it,” he told The Guardian. “It’s just not for other people, and I’m not saying it with aggression.”
He once again stressed that their relationship is private. Since Alvin and Swift met in 2016, they’ve kept their romance a secret, a decision the “All Too Well” singer revealed in her 2020 Netflix documentary “Miss Americana.”
“I was falling in love with a man who had a surprisingly normal, harmonious life,” she said in the film. “We decided together that we want our relationship to be private. I was happy. But I wasn’t happy in the way I was taught to be happy. It was happiness without anyone’s participation. We were just happy.”
The couple rarely appears in public and, as a rule, avoids photographers. The couple often attend the same premieres and award ceremonies to support each other, but they never walk the red carpet together. Alvin told The Guardian that he was uncomfortable drawing attention to their romance.
“I do not know how best to tell about it. I mean, I know about people… of this scale of interest and that the world exists. It’s just not something that I particularly care about, or I’m not really interested in feeding, I think, because the more it’s fed, the more you open the gates to invasion,” he said. “I think it’s just my response to a culture in which there is a growing expectation that everything will be given. If you don’t write about how you make coffee in the morning, or if you don’t let someone take a picture when you leave the house, is this privacy? I do not know if this is true. So I just don’t feed it.”
