Joe Alwyn’s neighbors called the police on him as a child when he pranked them with a blood-soaked letter

Joe Alwyn was a prankster as a child.

The Brutalist actor, 33, revealed the The Drew Barrymore Show that he once pulled a prank on his neighbors that got him and his older brother visited by police officers. When asked about the “funniest” thing someone has “shouted” at him, Alwyn described the story.

“When I was about 8 years old, I thought it would be a fun idea to prank the neighbors. And I wrote some letters. They were funny, but they were of the menacing-prank kind, and they were dipped in fake blood from a toy store.”

Alwyn then said he “ran up and down the road” with his brother and put the letters in their neighbour’s mailboxes. He joked: “Prank done, achieved! Big!” However, Alwyn said it wasn’t so simple after that when a neighbor called his parents and asked about the letter and things escalated.

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“The street … was soon filled with the whole neighborhood crying and screaming and worried and understandably they had called the police and Scotland Yard were on their way,” he recalled. “Police cars appeared on the road because they have a killer to catch!”

“At this point I’m thinking I’m going to jail,” he continued. “About three policemen came into the house, we had to confess our crime and they stood over me and my brother and because he’s 18 months older … he was the one who took the head off.”

The actor added: “I don’t remember what the policeman shouted at me, but they shouted.”

Earlier this week was Kind of kindness star made his first ever appearance on a late night talk show, Late Night with Seth Meyers to promote his new film the brutalist, where he plays the son of wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce).

On the show, Meyers, 51, praised Alwyn’s performance in the film – which also stars Adrien Brody as a Hungarian Jewish architect – before asking him how he was doing “so far” in his first appearance on a late-night talk show.

“Terrible,” Alwyn replied, making the audience laugh. Then he paused and smiled before telling Meyers, “No, that’s great. I’m kidding.”

Alwyn has mainly kept his private life and romance out of the limelight over the years. Following his high-profile breakup with Taylor Swift after six years of dating, a source told PEOPLE that Alwyn was “doing well” and “focused on work,” splitting his time between “London and NYC”

He talked about how he handles the limelight The Guardian in a recent interview that he tries to “focus on the things that are meaningful to me: friends, family, work, of course.”

The Brutalist is in the cinema now.