Taylor Swift’s relationship with Joe Alwyn only got a few nods in her Miss Americana documentary, but was that always the plan?
“I didn’t even meet him till the very end, so no,” director Lana Wilson recently said during a screening held at New York City’s Museum of the Moving Image, according to the Daily Mail. “Her relationships have been through the microscope, I didn’t really have any interest in filming that.”
Wilson added, “She’s been through so much, this should be private, like, it’s not related to the themes in the film or what I thought she was going through right then. I thought she was going through something so profound and powerful, this real change that didn’t really have anything to do with her relationships so it was never something I wanted to film.”
According to Wilson, it “felt disrespectful and weird” to film Swift, 34, with then-boyfriend Alwyn, 33. (Us Weekly confirmed in April 2023 that Swift and Alwyn broke up after six years together.)
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“It never occurred to me, in a strange way,” Wilson concluded.
Swift’s documentary premiered on Netflix in 2020, charting the pop star’s rise to fame up until the release of her 2019’s Lover. Alwyn only appeared in the background of a few scenes, including an infamous one where Swift ran from the stage to hug him after a concert. She later sang an acoustic rendition of “Call It What You Want” in their living room with Alwyn presumably behind the camera. Both moments were likely part of Swift’s archival footage that was included.
Swift also briefly addressed the pair’s calls for privacy in one of her Miss Americana interviews.
“I was falling in love with someone who had a really wonderfully normal, balanced, grounded life,” Swift said, without mentioning Alwyn by name. “We decided together that we wanted our relationship to be private. I wasn’t happy in the way that I’d been trained to be happy. It was happiness without anyone else’s input. It was just we were happy.”
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Swift and Alwyn dated between 2016 and early 2023.
“I would hope that anyone and everyone can empathize and understand the difficulties that come with the end of a long, loving, fully committed relationship of over six and a half years,” Alwyn told the Sunday Times in a June profile, breaking his silence on the split. “That is a hard thing to navigate. What is unusual and abnormal in this situation is that, one week later, it’s suddenly in the public domain and the outside world is able to weigh in.”
He added, “As everyone knows, we together — both of us, mutually — decided to keep the more private details of our relationship private. It was never something to commodify and I see no reason to change that now.”
Swift has since moved on with NFL star Travis Kelce with a source exclusively revealing in the latest Us Weekly cover story that the Grammy winner sees the 35-year-old athlete as “The One.”
