Joe Alwyn has had an astonishing rise. After his breakthrough with Ang Lee, he wowed in Conversations with Friends and now stars in The Brutalist. Throw in his ex, Taylor Swift, and you have a redhot A-lister ready to go

If – as projected – The Brutalist goes to the 2025 Academy Awards and cleans up, there will be some knowing, told-you-so nods from critics and industry experts. A monumental epic, the film has already earned comparisons to Citizen Kane and the Daniel Day-Lewis masterpiece There Will Be Blood. Over an engrossing three and a half hours, with an intermission, The Brutalist wrestles with the American dream, the vagaries of capitalism, the immigrant experience and antisemitism. Everyone agrees its lead, Adrien Brody, who already has a little gold statue, has never been better. The film is shot entirely on an obscure retro format, VistaVision, that hasn’t been used on an American movie since 1961. Tick, tick, tick, tick: textbook Oscar-bait.

Not that Joe Alwyn, 33, the British actor who also stars in The Brutalist sees it that way. “To be honest, I thought it might be a really good film that not many people would end up seeing,” he says, when we hunker down for a morning coffee at a hotel in central London. Alwyn is dressed entirely in dark blue; the only flashes of colour are the laces of his hiking boots. He’s over 6ft, but he slouches a little, so you wouldn’t immediately know. “Who knows, maybe it still will?” he continues. “I hope not. But given the things against it, given that it ticks most boxes of what you’re not meant to make as a film these days: length, content, all of that – anything on top of that is a really nice surprise.”