When Barry Keoghan watches a film that speaks to him, he likes to get in touch with the director to tell them. It’s something he thinks more people in the industry need to do.
As he notes, “I just didn’t know enough about it — there were no avenues. There were college courses, stuff like that, but I’d not finished school. I was kicked out of school. So that was that.”
Keoghan discovered exactly what it was aged 16 on the set of his first acting job, 2010’s gritty Irish crime thriller “Between the Canals” (a role he got after answering a casting notice on a shop window and calling the director every few weeks).
“I remember on ‘Between the Canals,’ when the camera went up I was like, this is it. It was such a feeling that stands alone from anything else,” he says. “It wasn’t like ‘I want to chase this high.’ It was just, this is where it is, this is where I belong, this is where I’m accepted.”
After his debut, Keoghan had a brief stint as one of the first pupils at what would become the Bow Street Academy, Dublin’s now-renowned acting institution, before being cast in his breakout role, cult Irish TV series “Love/Hate.” Playing a baby-faced assassin who was gunned down at the end of the first season, he offered hints of the magnetic screen presence that would later come to define him. Then came Yann Demange’s acclaimed thriller “’71” as a young IRA initiate (also gunned down) and, a couple of years later, Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk” as a civilian boat hand. He was off.
In 2024, he talked to Louis Theroux about the abuse he’d received about his own son, born in 2022 with a former partner, and online accusations that he was an “absent father.” “People love to use my son as ammunition,” he said. More recently, on SiriusXM’s “The Morning Mash Up” he discussed the “hate” he’d gotten over his appearance, which had reached the point where it made him “really go inside myself, not want to attend places, not want to go outside.”
But now, Keoghan tells Variety he wants to “step into a new chapter of my life where I let my work speak for me … I want to close the book on it, put my head up, have a smile and enjoy the moment.” He laughs at himself. “I feel like I just read that line off something. I didn’t, but I did look out the window as I said it and smiled.” Clearly playing a member of The Beatles can be good for you (thankfully he’s some way from wrapping — “we’re still going strong… it’s four movies at the end of the day!”).
But this new chapter comes with solid gravitas behind it. Now an Academy-endorsed rising Cannes veteran mixing buzzy arthouse with red hot studio releases, Keoghan’s reached the status where he can effectively chart his own course, whether that be telling stories with a deeply personal connection like “Lemonade” and doing so through his own company, or, diving into giant studio-backed features about the most famous band in history.
“I pick projects quite specifically,” he says. While he says he loved being a part of “Peaky Blinders” and “loved making the movie — it was incredible,” he won’t reveal why he chose not to return to for the upcoming sequel series on Netflix (Jamie Bell has replaced him as Duke Shelby). But it’s clear this specificity played a part.
“I carefully, cautiously pick because I just want to enjoy, and I want to heal, I want to tell, I want to find, I want to explore. I want to discover all of those things while I’m making a movie with people who are like-minded.”
This pool of like-minded people will continue to grow as Keoghan slides into their DMs to send them notes of praise about their films (although he does admit he’s now in a place where he can get others do it for him).
Source: variety.com