He was nominated for an Oscar and now he’s the leading man in one of this year’s most talked-about films, Saltburn. It’s a long way from his foster-home upbringing in Dublin.
Barry Keoghan is sitting in a coffee shop in an obscure suburban London street, his feline ice-blue eyes dancing with fond amusement as he talks about how his family back in inner-city north Dublin (his mother had nine siblings) have reacted to their “lad-een” (“We put ‘een’ on the end of everything to make it sound small”) being a bona fide star now. Having become part of the Marvel sphere with 2021′s Eternals, he was then nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar for his unforgettable part as the vulnerable and abused boy Dominic in The Banshees of Inisherin. Now he’s going next-level leading man with his mesmerising turn as Oliver, the comprehensive kid plunged into toffdom, in Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn. Keoghan is in every scene, by turns dejected, smouldering, powerless and vengeful. Awards talk is already buzzing.
“My family’s most concerned about my wellbeing, all the [stardom] stuff is secondary to them,” says Keoghan, 31. Then he adds, with his impish grin: “But they have a good chat about it in the pub! They get their pints in.” Name-dropping their cousin is mates with Colin Farrell, the Rock and Timothée Chalamet? “Yeah! You know what I mean?” Keoghan hoots uproariously.
You can hardly begrudge them basking in reflected glory. After all, Keoghan’s childhood in economically deprived Summerhill, with its endemic drug problem, was as far from Hollywood as you can get. He had no relationship with his father; his mother, Debbie, was a heroin addict. When he was five he and his younger brother, Eric, were placed in foster care. Over the next five years they went between 13 different homes before moving into their aunt and granny’s two-bedroom flat. “My cousin, who I call my sister, was 15 and she gave up her bedroom for us — until five years ago she was sleeping in a room with my auntie. I owe them all so much.”
Debbie died when Barry was 12. “It wasn’t a shock,” he says of losing her. “But oh, she was so beautiful.” He shows me his chunky silver bracelet with “Debbie” engraved on it. “I pray to her every day.” He and Eric used to visit her when she would end up in hospital with drug-related illnesses. “I’d do this Elvis dance for her. They’d just rereleased A Little Less Conversation — she loved it. I was working with Austin [Butler, who played Elvis in Baz Luhrmann’s biopic, and who stars with Keoghan in Steven Spielberg’s forthcoming miniseries Masters of the Air] and I shared that memory, started doing the dance for him … " He drifts away, lost in memories.
It’s a sunny autumn morning and Keoghan had arrived in an Uber (“Where are we? My agents chose it, they’re American. They don’t know London”) without an entourage. He’s meltingly sweet-natured, with no hint of the menace that laced his recent role as the gangster Jonny in Netflix’s beloved Top Boy, or his Joker cameo in the latest Batman film. Instead he fusses over a customer’s cocker spaniel, confiding how he misses his German shepherd, who is currently in training school, pets not being allowed in the central London flat he’s renting. There were recent reports he had split from his girlfriend, the orthodontist Alyson Kierans, but she lives nearby with their one-year-old son, Brando (“I love that name, it’s so strong”). When I ask if he can confirm this, he says he’ll get back to me with a statement, after he’s conferred with Kierans (he doesn’t).
As befits the unglamorous surroundings, Keoghan is discreet in a black Alexander McQueen tracksuit, though he’s fast gaining a reputation for his adventurous style. He wore a scarlet McQueen suit to the Baftas, violet Louis Vuitton to the Oscars and recently sat beside Kylie Minogue in Burberry’s front row — in head-to-toe houndstooth.
“I love fashion. I see it as a way of being bold, it’s another form of expressing yourself,” he says with a grin. “I love Halloween, I get to play all the characters I’ve ever dreamt of playing. Last year I was Robin, Alyson was the Joker and Brando was Batman.”
Keoghan was born to express himself. “I was always wanting to not follow the dress codes. I felt comfy with the denim jacket when everyone else was in trackies. I’d see movies and get ideas. After seeing The Basketball Diaries I bought a Moleskine notebook and started carrying it around. When people said, ‘What are you doing?’ I’d say, ‘I like it!’ I’d always do it differently.”
He knew he simply had to act from the age of 14, when he starred in his school play My Babysitter Is an Alien. “On stage I couldn’t see anyone, the lights were so bright, but everyone was laughing. It wasn’t just about getting attention but that feeling of playing someone else for the first time was incredible. It felt like an addiction, a separation from reality that I loved.”
That addiction could have struggled to find an outlet. Keoghan started to “mess around” at school and was told plays were off the agenda. But a year later he spotted an advert in a shop window calling for actors for a film. He phoned the director/writer Mark O’Connor, who said he was still waiting for finance. “I hadn’t a fecking breeze what finance was but for the next year I was persistent, I kept phoning and phoning. Finally he saw me.”
Keoghan was cast and the film, Between the Canals, was released as he turned 18. Various roles in Irish films followed, then Christopher Nolan cast him in 2017′s Dunkirk, next to the likes of Mark Rylance and Cillian Murphy (another buddy) and Hollywood started calling. What would have happened if he hadn’t seen that shop-window advert? “I would have found my way towards [acting],” he says firmly.
Yet so many looked-after children like Keoghan (it’s pronounced Kyoh-gan — “I always say if your name’s difficult to pronounce it’s a good sign — think of Saoirse Ronan or Cillian Murphy”) end up falling between society’s cracks, despite big dreams. Along with his family’s support, another saviour came in the form of two local youth clubs. “Youth clubs are one of the main reasons I stayed on the good path. I’d go there after school, get my dinner, they took us on trips.” It was there he learnt boxing to a high level (the resulting physique is very much in evidence in Saltburn, though he’s having to box less now to keep film insurers happy). “My granny got me into it, she was big on the discipline. I remember coming back to the house crying because someone had hit me and she was like, ‘Get back down there!’ It was that tough Irish thing.”
Granny is now giving him tips on bringing up Brando (“She was like mother and father to me in one and she did a great job — I think so anyway!”). He’s also eager to hear from friends. “You want to have some fatherhood of your own to base it on and I don’t, so I take advice off people like Cillian and Colin [Farrell] a lot — I’ve seen Colin’s love for his kids and I now get that. When your kid gives you that little smile it makes you feel like you’re the only person in the world. You’ve got to be there unconditionally for that little being.”
Keoghan is touchingly unblasé about his starry friendships. Take Robert Pattinson, whom he hung out with on The Batman — “Lovely, lovely lad, a really good friend.” Or Chalamet, who singled out his performance next to Nicole Kidman in The Killing of a Sacred Deer as his favourite of 2017. (“I was like, ‘Bro, thanks.’ He was like, ‘Bro, no worries.’ I was like, ‘Wait, are we bros?’ He’s a legend.”) Then there was the Rock. “When I met him I just couldn’t talk, I was like this,” Keoghan says, mouth hanging open. “Then he took me in for a hug and I was like, ‘Oh my God, the Rock is hugging me.’ Getting to sit alongside these people you admire is crazy. I don’t want to lose that fanboy sense.”
He wants Brando to grow up a Londoner. “He was born in St Thomas’ Hospital — I cut the cord but I was so nervous I was shaking. I thought it would be cool, but I was scared I was going to cut his leg off.” He can’t see himself returning permanently to Dublin (“I want to move around, have experiences”), but he loves popping over for visits, especially to Granny (”I’ll aim low and say she’s 91″).
Does he spoil her? “Yeah.” Keoghan beams. “She loves a top from Marks & Spencer, or a little holiday here and there. She’s always like, ‘Are you eating? You look good.’ I go, ‘So do you, darling — are you using your Nivea cream?’ She’s a big advocate for her Nivea and for cabbage water. I love cabbage water — bits of bacon floating around. Full of iron. Lovely!” Meanwhile his brother, Eric, works as a stagehand on film sets. “We were on the [2021 medieval adventure] The Green Knight together — he says, ‘I put in more hours than you did.’ The cheeky fecker!”
While we’ve been talking Keoghan has drunk two iced lattes, just the ticket — he says — to counterbalance his ADHD medication: “It makes me quite sleepy.” He received his diagnosis three years ago. “I always knew I had it but I stayed away from it at school. I didn’t want to be labelled. The stigma was always, ‘Oh, he’s hyper,’ and then people throw in” — he affects a middle-class British accent — “‘Oh, I think I have ADHD.’ But it’s not cool to say that — if you think you have it, take the medication and see how you react. When I’ve taken it it’s like a junction working smoothly, the lights are on. When I haven’t the lights are off and it’s chaos — it physically hurts to stay still sometimes. I lose my train of thought. A lot of creative people seem to have something like ADHD. But I wouldn’t change it, even if it can sometimes be annoying for other people. They’re like, ‘Ah, shut up, Barry!’”
What’s clear is that creativity takes its toll. Keoghan is (wisely) picky about which roles he accepts because they drain him. “I lose a little bit of myself with each part because I’m going to lend my entire self to it. But when you get it right it’s euphoric. You lose all sense of time, you feel nauseous — not I’m-going-to-be-sick nauseous, more a feeling you don’t know if you’re above or beneath the stars.”
Beautiful as his words are, I doubt Keoghan would talk so lyrically to his old Summerhill muckers, some of whom — he admits — have been taken aback by his meteoric rise. “One day you’re there with them in the youth club playing football, the next you’re on the fecking screen. I know how I’d react to that — ‘No way!’, ‘You think you’re so great!’ In the pub they’re like, ‘Hollywood, this is on you,’ or, ‘Leave your Hollywood at the door.’ But it’s not a bad thing, it’s just the Irish way of bringing you down. It’s humbling and I wouldn’t have it any other way. You need a bit of craic and charm and banter.”
He may be in exile, but there’s no danger of Keoghan neglecting any of those.
Saltburn is in NZ cinemas from November 16.
Written by: Julia Llewellyn Smith
© The Times of London