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.
