Joe Alwyn is the rare leading man who manages to steer his path just out of the blinding glare of fame. In the seven years since Academy Award–winning director Ang Lee tapped Alwyn, then acting at London’s Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, to play the lead in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Alwyn has chosen his roles with the discernment of somebody who is far more interested in being in the right place than everywhere at once. As the 31-year-old British actor awaits the release of Conversations With Friends, though, his days among the normal-ish people are numbered.

Conversations With Friends is the TV adaptation of the debut novel by Sally Rooney, the young Irish writer whose millennial fairy tales are imbued with socialist politics, sadness and sex, and have sold millions of copies. Conversations, which published in 2017 and catapulted the then-unknown writer to cult “great millennial author” status, is the sunniest of her works. Alwyn plays Nick Conway, a married actor who is the sole male member of a thoroughly modern love quadrangle. Though the adaptation, which will premiere on Hulu this May, doesn’t take many liberties with the story’s choreography, it breathes new life into Rooney’s pared-down prose.