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When Joe Alwyn made his acting debut in the starring role of director Ang Lee’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, he was unaware that nearly a decade later, it would still be his proudest role to date. This isn’t to say that any of his subsequent projects, from his nuanced portrayal of Nick in Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends (2022) to his engrossing performance as Samuel Masham in Yorgos Lanthimos’ critically acclaimed period drama The Favourite (2018), were any less compelling. Yet, there’s just something about a first time.

“I feel like I’ve been slightly chasing that experience ever since,” the tousled-blonde, 33-year-old actor admits to actor Bella Ramsey, his friend and co-star from Catherine Called Birdy (2022). “I think there’s the realisation that it won’t be the same again, and I’ve come to terms with that. Your eyes are wide in a way they aren’t after. And as time’s passed and I’ve worked more, there’s—in some ways I wish there weren’t—a business side to the whole thing. I try to ignore that as much as possible, but it creeps up in various ways. I find that difficult because it can impact your experience of a job in a way I had no idea about initially. So, it colours things differently.”

Hollywood’s tension between art and commerce also throbs at the core of The Brutalist, Joe’s latest cinematic foray. A sprawling, audacious 3.5-hour post-war epic (complete with an interval), the film stormed the Venice Film Festival, earning a thunderous 13-minute standing ovation. Among its many parables—the tension between personal heritage and societal assimilation, capitalism and the corruption of ideals, and the conflicted pursuit of the American Dream—lies, at its heart, the shaky pursuit of creativity in its purest form, and the powers-at-large who nail those dreams face down in reality.

As Harry Lee Van Buren, Joe inhabits a character steeped in contradiction—the silver-spooned son of an industrialist, whose entitlement becomes both armour and poison. It’s a role that casts Joe on the other side of the artistic chasm: a figure of power, perversion, and privilege, sculpting the lives of others at whim.

At the centre of The Brutalist is László Tóth, a fictional Hungarian-Jewish architect (brought to life by Adrien Brody), whose post-WWII migration to America ignites a fraught journey of reinvention—of self, work, and marriage to Erzsébet Tóth (Felicity Jones). Hired by Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn) to build a grand library for his father, what ensues is a decade-long saga of László becoming embroiled in the Van Burens’ sordid web—sticky with deceit, violence, self-shame, and bigotry—as he thrashes around in the dizzying quest for creative success and the quivering reminder of the price he’s made to pay in his pursuit. The film seeps into your core, lingering for weeks like a ghost harbouring your body as its unwelcome host. And in a confrontational final scene (no spoilers) which hits you like a cold, hard slap in the face, Joe delivers his most visceral performance to date.

Sitting down with actor Bella Ramsey to dissect it all, they chat navigating their own artistic ambition in Hollywood, their dreams to direct and write, becoming Harry Lee Van Buren in The Brutalist and his upcoming roles in director Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet, and director Aneil Karia’s Hamlet.

Bella Ramsey: Hello, Joe Alwyn.
Joe Alwyn: Hello, Bella Ramsey. Thank you for coming over and thank you for watching the film. We are sitting here [laughs]…

BR:…in your brightly coloured apartment [laughs]. So, I saw your new film The Brutalist yesterday at a press screening.
JA: Oh, so it wasn’t just you sitting…

BR: It wasn’t just me. There were 10-15 journalists there and I just sat at the back.
JA: Writing on notepads, furiously.

BR: Oh, yeah. Harshly critiquing every bit…
JA: Heckling!

BR: Heckling, if you will, yeah [laughs]. I thought it was a true story going into it and then afterwards I was researching who the real László Tóth was and actually there’s a Hungarian geologist called László Tóth…
JA: Did you read up on him?

BR: Yeah, he vandalised a Michelangelo statue.
JA: Did he?

BR: Yeah, but obviously not the same guy.
JA: That’s crazy, I didn’t know that. I think Brady [Corbet] chose the name László Tóth—from what he said in Venice at the press conference—because it’s the equivalent of ‘Joe Bloggs’. It was a kind of nondescript, everyman name. But when I read The Brutalist’s script, I assumed it was a biopic too because it was so detailed, and it spans so wide but it’s so incredibly personal.

BR: Yeah, it’s so epic but so specific, in terms of details, that it did very much come across as a biopic. So interesting that it wasn’t, but done so well that it felt so personal. You play Harry Lee Van Buren, and you start out annoying and rich and then you end up so scary and dark. Like really dark. It was amazing to watch you do that.
JA: Oh, I’m glad. Yeah, he’s definitely unpleasant and nasty and slippery and not a good guy. I remember reading [the script] and part of what I found interesting was thinking about what it’s like for people like that living in that very specific kind of [wealthy] family and world, where you have those big—in this case American—mega-money capitalist families and the kind of entitlement and narcissism and greed that can come with that. And I suppose Harry is someone who’s grown up with too much of one thing and not enough of another—so all the money in the world and all the material comfort and safety but probably no real love from his dad or no real sense of being taken care of in the right way. I couldn’t find any excuse for his behaviour, but I tried to think about it like ‘this is someone who’s constantly seeking his father’s approval’. I mean, those kinds of families, I feel like we see them all the time now. We read about them in the news, these big family businesses, often running countries now, but also in shows like Succession. They have so much but also so little, in a way. They’re incredibly stunted and hollow. But have the financial and legal power to do what they want and treat people how they like and it’s awful.

To read the full interview, pre-order Wonderland’s Winter 24 issue now.

When Joe Alwyn made his acting debut in the starring role of director Ang Lee’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, he was unaware that nearly a decade later, it would still be his proudest role to date. This isn’t to say that any of his subsequent projects, from his nuanced portrayal of Nick in Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends (2022) to his engrossing performance as Samuel Masham in Yorgos Lanthimos’ critically acclaimed period drama The Favourite (2018), were any less compelling. Yet, there’s just something about a first time.

“I feel like I’ve been slightly chasing that experience ever since,” the tousled-blonde, 33-year-old actor admits to actor Bella Ramsey, his friend and co-star from Catherine Called Birdy (2022). “I think there’s the realisation that it won’t be the same again, and I’ve come to terms with that. Your eyes are wide in a way they aren’t after. And as time’s passed and I’ve worked more, there’s—in some ways I wish there weren’t—a business side to the whole thing. I try to ignore that as much as possible, but it creeps up in various ways. I find that difficult because it can impact your experience of a job in a way I had no idea about initially. So, it colours things differently.”

Hollywood’s tension between art and commerce also throbs at the core of The Brutalist, Joe’s latest cinematic foray. A sprawling, audacious 3.5-hour post-war epic (complete with an interval), the film stormed the Venice Film Festival, earning a thunderous 13-minute standing ovation. Among its many parables—the tension between personal heritage and societal assimilation, capitalism and the corruption of ideals, and the conflicted pursuit of the American Dream—lies, at its heart, the shaky pursuit of creativity in its purest form, and the powers-at-large who nail those dreams face down in reality.

As Harry Lee Van Buren, Joe inhabits a character steeped in contradiction—the silver-spooned son of an industrialist, whose entitlement becomes both armour and poison. It’s a role that casts Joe on the other side of the artistic chasm: a figure of power, perversion, and privilege, sculpting the lives of others at whim.

At the centre of The Brutalist is László Tóth, a fictional Hungarian-Jewish architect (brought to life by Adrien Brody), whose post-WWII migration to America ignites a fraught journey of reinvention—of self, work, and marriage to Erzsébet Tóth (Felicity Jones). Hired by Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn) to build a grand library for his father, what ensues is a decade-long saga of László becoming embroiled in the Van Burens’ sordid web—sticky with deceit, violence, self-shame, and bigotry—as he thrashes around in the dizzying quest for creative success and the quivering reminder of the price he’s made to pay in his pursuit. The film seeps into your core, lingering for weeks like a ghost harbouring your body as its unwelcome host. And in a confrontational final scene (no spoilers) which hits you like a cold, hard slap in the face, Joe delivers his most visceral performance to date.

Sitting down with actor Bella Ramsey to dissect it all, they chat navigating their own artistic ambition in Hollywood, their dreams to direct and write, becoming Harry Lee Van Buren in The Brutalist and his upcoming roles in director Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet, and director Aneil Karia’s Hamlet.

Bella Ramsey: Hello, Joe Alwyn.
Joe Alwyn: Hello, Bella Ramsey. Thank you for coming over and thank you for watching the film. We are sitting here [laughs]…

BR:…in your brightly coloured apartment [laughs]. So, I saw your new film The Brutalist yesterday at a press screening.
JA: Oh, so it wasn’t just you sitting…

BR: It wasn’t just me. There were 10-15 journalists there and I just sat at the back.
JA: Writing on notepads, furiously.

BR: Oh, yeah. Harshly critiquing every bit…
JA: Heckling!

BR: Heckling, if you will, yeah [laughs]. I thought it was a true story going into it and then afterwards I was researching who the real László Tóth was and actually there’s a Hungarian geologist called László Tóth…
JA: Did you read up on him?

BR: Yeah, he vandalised a Michelangelo statue.
JA: Did he?

BR: Yeah, but obviously not the same guy.
JA: That’s crazy, I didn’t know that. I think Brady [Corbet] chose the name László Tóth—from what he said in Venice at the press conference—because it’s the equivalent of ‘Joe Bloggs’. It was a kind of nondescript, everyman name. But when I read The Brutalist’s script, I assumed it was a biopic too because it was so detailed, and it spans so wide but it’s so incredibly personal.

BR: Yeah, it’s so epic but so specific, in terms of details, that it did very much come across as a biopic. So interesting that it wasn’t, but done so well that it felt so personal. You play Harry Lee Van Buren, and you start out annoying and rich and then you end up so scary and dark. Like really dark. It was amazing to watch you do that.
JA: Oh, I’m glad. Yeah, he’s definitely unpleasant and nasty and slippery and not a good guy. I remember reading [the script] and part of what I found interesting was thinking about what it’s like for people like that living in that very specific kind of [wealthy] family and world, where you have those big—in this case American—mega-money capitalist families and the kind of entitlement and narcissism and greed that can come with that. And I suppose Harry is someone who’s grown up with too much of one thing and not enough of another—so all the money in the world and all the material comfort and safety but probably no real love from his dad or no real sense of being taken care of in the right way. I couldn’t find any excuse for his behaviour, but I tried to think about it like ‘this is someone who’s constantly seeking his father’s approval’. I mean, those kinds of families, I feel like we see them all the time now. We read about them in the news, these big family businesses, often running countries now, but also in shows like Succession. They have so much but also so little, in a way. They’re incredibly stunted and hollow. But have the financial and legal power to do what they want and treat people how they like and it’s awful.

To read the full interview, pre-order Wonderland’s Winter 24 issue now.