Andrew Scott Breaks Silence on 'Tortured Man Club' Group Chat with Joe Alwyn and Paul Mescal

Andrew Scott loves The Tortured Poets Department.

“Taylor’s new album is sensational! I texted her yesterday to say how amazing it is,” the Ripley star told Variety. “I think she is just a force of nature, just an extraordinary human, and this album is really, really amazing.”

While he says his favorite song off the album is “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” he isn’t picking favorites in the breakup between Swift and her muse, ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn, whom he’s buddies with.

There has long been speculation that the title of the album comes from a group chat between Alywn, Scott, and Paul Mescal. It was during the 2022 Actors on Actors conversation between Alwyn and Mescal that Alwyn first mentioned the chat, humorously titled “The Tortured Man Club,” and revealed that Scott was the one who started it.

But Scott wants to set the record straight and says it was all a very innocent case of six degrees of separation: he and Alwyn had just starred in Catherine Called Birdy, he and Mescal would go on to do All of Us Strangers together, and Alwyn and Mescal had both starred in TV adaptations of Sally Rooney novels, the former in Conversations With Friends and the latter in Normal People, so he simply made the connection.

“So they were about to play these tortured characters, and I had played a tortured character in Fleabag. It wasn’t about our own characteristics,” he clarified. He also admitted that the chat never really got off the ground, only ever consisting of three texts.

“You know those groups that you set up, and they just collapse,” he explained, breaking my heart.