Andrew Scott is setting the record straight about that infamous group chat.

Andrew Scott is setting the record straight about that infamous group chat.

Nearly two years after Joe Alwyn and Paul Mescal revealed they were in a group chat with the Ripley star called “Tortured Man Club”—a thread that gained new notoriety amid the release of the The Tortured Poets Department by Joe’s ex Taylor Swift—Andrew gave insight into the true origins of the text chain.

Let me tell you what that is!” Andrew told Variety in an article published May 22. “They were about to play these tortured characters, and I had played a tortured character in Fleabag. It wasn’t about our own characteristics!”

And although he created the group chat to connect Paul, who starred in the adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People and Joe ahead of his work on Conversations with Friends, it quickly fell off. As Andrew, 47, put it, “I think there were three texts, like, ‘Hey, guys.’ You know those groups that you set up, and they just collapse.”

Of course, Joe, 33, and Paul, 28, had already noted the thread had dried up.

“It hasn’t had much use recently,” Joe—who split from Taylor after six years last spring—admitted during their 2022 Variety chat, to which Paul replied, “I feel like we’re less tortured now.”

The trio may have left their typewriters back at their respective apartments, but that didn’t mean Andrew enjoyed The Tortured Poets Department any less.

Taylor’s new album is sensational!” Andrew gushed to Variety. “I texted her yesterday to say how amazing it is.”