Joe Alwyn Says He’s Moved On from His Relationship with Taylor Swift—And Other People Need to Do the Same

No one likes to feel like they're stuck living in the past, but when your ex is one of the most famous people on the planet, it can be hard to get other people to move on—which can be extra frustrating when you have fully moved on.

Just ask Joe Alwyn, because that's the situation the actor finds himself in, according to a new interview with The Guardian.

While speaking to the outlet to promote his buzzy new drama The Brutalist, Alwyn was, predictably, hit with questions about his very famous ex, Taylor Swift. When the interviewer "put it to Alwyn that he must just want to move on," the actor, who split from Swift in early 2023 after six years of dating, pushed back, making it clear that he has moved on; it's the rest of the world that seems stuck on his past relationship.

“That’s something for other people to do,” he explained. “We’re talking about something that’s a while ago now in my life. So that’s for other people. That’s what I feel.”

Before Alwyn shut the topic down, he fielded other questions about his relationship with Swift—like "Did he fear that his relationship with Swift would overshadow his career?"

“I have tried just to focus on controlling what I can control," Alwyn replied, addressing the question, but only in vague terms. “And, right from the beginning, tried to focus on the things that are meaningful for me: friends, family, work, of course. So noise outside of that, I think I’ve done what lots of people who find themselves in the public eye do, which is just try and ignore it. If you don’t, and if you let all of that other stuff in, and if it starts to affect you and your behavior, you’re living from the outside in. And then you’re pretty fucked.”

When the interviewer suggested that what Alwyn had just described "sounds exhausting," the actor insisted that he's anchored by the important people in his life.

“I have great family and friends and real things in my life; those are the things that kept me tethered to the ground,” Alwyn explained. “So I don’t know how else to say it, it’s… just in a different room.”

One thing Alwyn seemed (relatively) happy to discuss about his time with Swift was their lockdown collaborations for Folklore

“Lockdown was a whole host of surprises and that was pretty special,” Alwyn said of winning a Grammy (along with Swift and the album's other two producers, Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner) when Folklore won Album of the Year in 2021. “That was not something I would have foreseen.”

Of course, the same probably can't be said for the ongoing speculation about and public interest in his relationship with Swift, even long after its end—Alwyn will probably be facing that for a while before the world joins him in moving on.