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.
#Public gay porn my bestfriend full
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.