Joe Alwyn is known for keeping a low profile, but he seems to be doing things a bit differently this year. After more than five months, the British actor (and Taylor Swift’s ex) just made his return to Instagram with a very cryptic photo dump.
On February 19, 2024, Alwyn took to Instagram for the first time since September 2023 to share a 10-slide captionless photo carousel. The first picture in the post is a B&W mirror selfie in the woods — which, may we add, is very Taylor Swift-coded. The shot is followed by a snap of a dog at a pub, a meme from the original The Office, a picture of himself with Scottish actor Brian Cox, as well various nature landscape shots.
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Why is Alwyn just now choosing to make his return to Instagram? Well, it could be just a coincidence, or it could be something else. If we are going the speculative route, Alwyn has been the talk of the town since Taylor Swift announced her upcoming 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, during the Grammys 2024 earlier this month.
As soon as the first details about The Tortured Poets Department dropped, fans speculated the project could be about Joe Alwyn. For starters, the album’s name seems to be inspired by the name of a group chat the actor shares with Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott. Fans have also found clues in the tracklist that suggest Alwyn could have served as inspiration for Swift, particularly in songs like So Long, London and My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys.
As soon as fans started speculating about the subject matter of the album, an anonymous source close to Alwyn talked to the press to try to clear the air. “Joe has no reason to believe yet that she is going to diss him or their relationship [in the new album],” the source said. “She writes about her past using code and points of reference. It may just be that she is reflecting on their time together and he is hoping it is nothing more. If it is a diss album, that is shady. He helped her with song writing on her past album so it will really come as a shock to him if she talks about their breakup, as it is something he has not spoken of at all.”
However, the rumour mill started churning once again after Swift recently admitted to feeling lonely while working on her 2020 album folklore, which came out in the middle of their six-year-long relationship and notably boasts writing and producing credits by Alwyn.
“[While writing folklore, I was] imagining that, instead of being a lonely millennial woman covered in cat hair drinking my weight in white wine, I was a ghostly Victorian lady wandering through the woods with a candle in a candlestick holder, and I wrote only on parchment with a feathered quill,” Swift said during one of her Eras Tour concerts in Australia. (Again, this is all speculation, and it could all be just a big old coincidence or not even related at all, so take everything with a grain of salt.)
It’s worth noting that while Alwyn has been away from social media for almost half a year, he has been seen attending multiple public events in that time. In late 2023, he attended the GQ Men Of The Year Awards event in London. In January, he sat front row at the Emporio Armani fall-winter show as part of Milan Men’s Fashion Week, and just this week, he made his way to the British Vogue And Tiffany & Co. Celebrate Fashion and Film Party, where, much like Boygenius at the Grammys, he sported an Artists4Ceasefire pin on his lapel.
This article originally appeared on Teen Vogue.
