Renwick Street, being blind, must be one of the least-traveled streets in all New York, a one-block one-way that dead-ends at Canal and doesn’t see much traffic, foot or car. There’s a gym at the blind end, and he’s in there behind the tinted windows, the actor with the pain and hope of a generation in his eyes, gloved up and punching his heart out on a Tuesday afternoon.
Pah! Pah! Pah-pah-pah!
Pah-pah! Pah!
He’s hitting pads with his guy, Boss Man, bouncing and hooting as he finishes each round of hits. He grins and shouts:
—Hoooo! The Irish is here!
Sweaty and finished, he leaps from the ring, untapes his boxing gloves, and then holds the opening to his nose and inhales. The gloves smell of new leather and sweat.
—That smell is addictive, though, innit! Like the smell of your own shoes.
He is bigger than he looked in some of the movies he’s acted in—Dunkirk and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (both 2017) and The Banshees of Inisherin (2022), the movie in which he broke your heart and got an Academy Award nomination to show for it. In those movies, his strength emerged not in the form of muscles but of his eyes, which are thin almonds and yet emit more spark and glint than the average blue-eyed Irishman’s full-size blue eyes. They are lidded and vaguely DiCaprian, as if always peering or squinting to see things the rest of us don’t.
—There’s something different about the eyes, d’you know what I mean? he says at one point, turning so you can see them.
—See that? Something Eastern European maybe, I d’know.
Everything is different about Barry Keoghan. The way his face contorts ever so slightly to show you mischief or madness or melancholy, or maybe all three at once. The way he can take the piss out of people. The way he can take the piss out of himself. Whatever it is, it has to be something, because people—directors, other actors, movie audiences, awards voters—love him. He is the current Joker in the Batman movie franchise. He is a member of the Marvel universe (with Eternals). He’s in a new World War II miniseries produced by Spielberg and Hanks. And in Saltburn, the new film from writer-director Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman), he appears in every frame and gives a performance that will go down in movie history as the one that made Barry Keoghan a star.
He pops out the door of the boxing gym, as he has a thousand times out the doors of boxing gyms from Dublin to Cincinnati, and just starts walking. Normally there is more of a plan in place for these things, but he just says to me and Boss Man:
—Sh’we walk, lads?
He moves up and down streets like an urchin, careening across hot sidewalks as if looking for action, carrying the energy of a boy of fifteen, which is half his age. Barry is the name of a wee lad or an old man, not a man of thirty, but that is his name, given him by his dear mother, Debbie, and his father, before the troubles in the family.
Boss Man, Keoghan’s guy who keeps gentle watch over him, walks ten paces behind. Keoghan is full-chested and -biceped and speaks often with a smile, projecting a cheery confidence that Boss Man knows isn’t always there. Just now he is talking about acting. It is ostensibly what we are here to talk about, but it’s also a favorite topic of his because acting is a form of survival for him.
—I always had a little bit of it in me. I used to dance for my mother, to Elvis. “A Little Less Conversation.” Yeah, man, she loved that. It was her favorite song.
—So you’d be in the living room, and she would play the record?
—Yeah, well, it was when she was in hospital. And it could come on and me and my brother used to dance to it. We’d be by her bedside. She was always chirpy and always making sure we were good. Always a smile on her face. Ahh, brilliant. Then she got out of the hospital, but then she’d go back in. There was a few times that happened.
Barry and Eric, his brother, spent about seven years in the foster-care system. Maybe a dozen different families, a dozen houses. When Barry was twelve, their mother died of a drug overdose. She had fought addiction for much of his life. The boys went to live with their grandmother, her mother.
He walks farther down the sidewalk, no knowledge of these streets, no care about route or destination, talking about the whole mess of his upbringing.
—You know what, I’m proud of it. I’m not going to say what happened was the right thing, but it’s certainly given me a lot of ammunition.
You can take the mess of your life and do all kinds of things with it. You can let it wreck you or define you or empower you. You can take what happened to you (and something happens to each of us, sometime) and call it unjust or unfair or unlucky, but it doesn’t really matter, does it? Here, for example, is the kind of thing that happened to Keoghan as a boy: He’s in his grandmother’s flat in a rough part of Dublin, and his mother, who loved him and whom he loved, is banging on the locked door, crying and begging her mother to let her in, his grandmother refusing to let her daughter into the flat because that would only enable her addiction.
—As a kid, you don’t really know what to latch on to, he says.
Kids can feel happy in unhappy times because they don’t have a lifetime of comparisons. And Keoghan (pronounced KYOH-gan) knew happiness as a boy, certainly. The softness of his mother’s hands. Dancing to Elvis. Scrapping around with Eric.
—I remember I was walking around New York once with my brother, both as adults, and I popped into this restaurant to use the bathroom. This was just a few years ago. And the soap they used in the bathroom brought me back to when I was five or six, my mother giving me a bath and then bringing me down to watch feckin’ Pocahontas. And I never had that as a memory, but that smell brought me back to getting a bath and then her stickin’ me in front of Pocahontas. I believe in manifestations, and there’s a manifestation always happening. You just gotta be careful what you wish for, don’t you?
The seven years he spent in foster care? That’s a blur, he says. No real memories, at least that he cares to talk about. His story picks up again at fifteen, when he and his schoolboys were rambling about Dublin and he noticed an advertisement in a shop window, calling for actors. To be in a movie! The pay was something like 120 euros. He took down the phone number and called it. A man picked up (Mark O’Connor, the writer and director of the proposed film) and said he was still working on getting funding. Keoghan didn’t know what that meant and asked when he should show up. O’Connor said he would call him back. Keoghan, hearing nothing, called O’Connor back regularly for more than a year. When it was time to make the movie, Keoghan got the part.
This article appeared in the 90th Anniversary issue of Esquire
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He manifested it, he would say. Made it happen, didn’t he? It was a small part, but he found he liked pretending.
—I realized this is a job that allows me to express some sort of form that wasn’t me, do you get what I’m saying? It’s like subconscious therapy, he says. Those fifty seconds or whatever, between “action” and “cut,” there’s some sort of fecking euphoric disconnection to who you are. You’re in a limbo, if that’s the word, between both you and this other person. And you don’t get it every time. I’d be lying if I said you did. But that’s what I chase, that thing of not being me for those fifty seconds.
He was methodical in his chase. He began keeping lists of directors he wanted to work with. He manifested other parts, giving richly textured performances, a good many of them variations of impish misfits trying to elbow their way into the normal world. Dympna, an orphan so desperate for parenting that he seeks it from a crime family, in a mean little Irish film called Calm with Horses. Martin in The Killing of a Sacred Deer, a troubled lad with a dead father and an unhinged mother (Alicia Silverstone) who takes it out on Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman. George in Dunkirk. (Christopher Nolan was on his lists.) Dominic in The Banshees of Inisherin, the village mutt who, it turns out, holds more pain than anyone could have known. (Martin McDonagh was on the lists.)
The Joker, that was funny how that happened. He heard there might be an opening in the new Batman movie for the role of the Riddler. No one asked him to audition; no one encouraged him to send in a tape. But he sent in a tape. He spent ten dollars on a cane and a hat at a costume shop. He story boarded a scene in which he walks without speaking through a door and down a hall. He wore suspenders in a perfect X across his back. Music. Slo-mo. Creepy but funny. Methodical.
—I just made it up. I wanted to make it Kubrick-y: symmetrical, the X on the back, the square doorframe, everything square. I just wanted swag to come across. Swag and endearing. It was just me giving my idea. And then I’s like, I’ma send this in!
He did, and got the role. Well, not that role. The Riddler went to Paul Dano, a brilliant actor. Keoghan got the other role. The Joker. The Cesar Romero–Jack Nicholson–Heath Ledger–Joaquin Phoenix role. Now the Barry Keoghan role, visible so far only briefly in the 2022 movie The Batman and on YouTube in a deleted, creepy-AF scene with Robert Pattinson, but sure to return.
As for his matriculation into the Marvel universe, it started with a tweet: “@TheRealStanLee Stan Lee, Please make me a SuperHero :).” Just tweeted that one day in 2013, when his biggest part so far was the one from the movie with the phone number in the window. In 2019, after getting the role of Druig in Eternals, he retweeted his tweet, adding, “2013 . . . The power of Belief.” He added two emojis: a heart and a wolf. Keoghan means wolf cub.
He’s just fecking different, Keoghan is. Already with Oscar-caliber work on his résumé and he’s sending in audition tapes unbidden. Even back in Ireland, when teachers advised him to go to college for acting, his hunch said college was the last place he should go.
—I said, I don’t want to go to college for acting. You can’t! I don’t wanna have the same projected voice like everybody else walking in, or to sit up straight and deliver my line a certain way, with a certain articulation and whatever. I like that I’m sorta different. I like that I mumble.
Anyway, his method has worked so far. He downplays his own role in the making of Barry Keoghan, pointing to signs and manifestations of kismet and the thin line between natural and supernatural. He tells the story of choosing his costume for a movie, going over to the prop table to select some jewelry. He poked around, saw a cross, okay, saw a bracelet, picked up the bracelet, turned the bracelet over, saw an engraving. Froze. Asked the prop stylist: What’s this engraving? The stylist said, We don’t know. We bought it at some auction.
The engraving said DEBBIE.
—I said, That’s my mother’s name. Debbie. Aight? That’s crazy, innit? That’s a sign. That is a feckin’ sign! That day alone is like . . . . So I kept it. They were like, Where’s the bracelet? I’s like, I’m keepin’ that.
He went to a medium once, in Los Angeles. The name was passed along to Keoghan by a friend who thought maybe the medium could communicate with his mother. The medium told him to choose a page in a thick book. Keoghan chose 72. The medium knew it was the year his mother was born. He cracks up telling this.
—And that’s not on the Internet or anything. I’s like, Wowwwwww! Like, how’d—?
He finds comfort in believing in all of this. The soap in the bathroom, the bracelet, the power of Belief. Which is all good, but what’s also true is that Keoghan emerged from a chaotic early childhood with rules and goals in place. They say children crave structure, and in a life that had little, he created it. Big goals, like the lists of directors. He once auditioned for the lead in Steven Spielberg’s movie Ready Player One. He didn’t get it, but today when he talks about it, he says, “Me and Steven, we’ll work together,” and you believe they will. Once, on a late-night show in Ireland, he predicted he’d one day return with three Oscar statuettes to put on the host’s desk.
And he has little rules, like no pizza the night before the photo shoot. That had been my suggestion for the interview: walk around, get some New York pizza. No, no, came Keoghan’s response. Not before the shoot. He wanted his body to look good, and his face. He’s got Boss Man around, always a few paces behind, helping keep Keoghan on time and in shape. (Boss Man’s real name is, improbably, Michael Bossman.)
Keoghan suspects he’s always had ADHD, but it was just diagnosed three years ago, and he takes medication for it. That’s another way he can impose order, reining in his lively mind just enough so that he can use it more effectively.
—It’s something that should be recognized and talked about in adults, he says. And the medication: The difference is day and night. My mind used to be like a traffic jam, crazy, and then with the medication it’s like: One car goes, then another car goes.
The chaos is always just beneath, of course. It is his ammunition.
—I’m not one of these who wants to be happy all the time, because then you don’t appreciate happiness when you have it. I want to feel everything.
As he speaks, I’m flipping through, in my mind, the characters he’s chosen to play.
—I’m trying to think, as you’re talking, whether you’ve ever played a role where you have a strong mother character, I say.
—Um. Not . . . really.
—I can’t think of any, right?
—But. Yeah, no I haven’t. You’re dead right. You’ve made me think now. There are some father figures, more or less.
—Or no one.
A pause.
—Or no one.
He pauses again, looking down. Then he lets out a short, loud burst of a laugh.
—No one wants to be my mother or father. Even on film! All right, let’s wrap this up!
Brando Keoghan was born a year ago. Barry was in the delivery room. He had a song cued up for the occasion: “Canter,” by the Scottish singer Gerry Cinnamon.
—The lyrics is “This is the beginning of the rest of your life.” Those lyrics came on right as he was being born. I had the speaker set up. And it was tooching. It was very tooching. It was a moment—you know, these moments when we all share the same things. And now every time I play that song, I can get the smell of the theater he was in and everything. The cold of the gloves that was put on me, and the gown. Brings me right back. Now, was I nervous? Yes. Because I didn’t know how to cut any fecking cord. I’s like, This isn’t cutting, lads, can you help me? I’m afraid I’m gonna cut his leg! You know, it was so rubbery. It was just such a new thing to do! You get to see how the human body is working. And that moment when he got brought over to her, that’s one of my favorite moments ever, seeing her face touch his face.
He reaches up and flicks a leaf off a tree, like a boy, and laughs.
—He’s a little cheeky fecker. I get to see him tomorrow.
The boy is named after Marlon. He’s with his mom now while Keoghan is working.
—She’s an incredible mother. She has the maternal instinct. Brando is obsessed with her. And she’s never done this before, either, but I’m learning from her.
He learned from his granny, too, who, along with his aunt and a cousin, raised him and Eric after their mom died. Before that, the boys used to see their mother either in the hospital or on a Saturday. He says he doesn’t remember any of the fathers in the thirteen foster homes he lived in. Not one. And here he is, a father.
—And it’s hard for me to base it on anything, right? I’m up for discovering it, but we all usually have someone we base our father figure on, and our lessons. Not to diss my feckin’ own father, I just didn’t have that. But I’m being honest when I say this: I can base my being a father on my granny. She raised ten. She had a great, what do you call it, attitude about everything. Man or woman, that’s what I base it on. She was my father and mother in one.
We do the best with what we’ve got, and what we didn’t get.
—I’ll say it straight up: abandonment. Abandonment is embedded in me so deeply, and I’ve got to work through it, because I’ve got other responsibilities now. It’s just something that I’ve got to put a lot of time and effort into. But I’m loving it. I’m loving discovering about myself, my strengths. And that that happened, and it was nobody’s fault. Not my parents’. It just happened. I understand that now as an adult and as a father, that these things happen. I hold no resentment. I’m not bitter. My parents were young, and it was what it was. It gave me all the tools and challenges to define myself. And still, I ain’t where I wanna be. I don’t ever wanna be in a place where I feel I’ve conquered it. When he was born, the gods reached down and gave him eyes that can see your soul and a laugh that can make you cry, and with those extraordinary gifts he is quickly becoming an actor for all time. And it is acting that affords him an escape from the hardest memories. Having that gift makes him different from most people.
But the other parts of him, the parts that have sometimes felt abandoned or forgotten, the parts that allow him to show confidence and happiness, the parts that feel stronger because of what he’s endured, and the parts that are still afraid—in those, he is not so different from any of us after all.
He is back in the hotel in New York where he’s staying, standing in the lobby. A woman from the front desk approaches, smiling. She tells him she has good news: They found his bracelet. The one that says DEBBIE.
—It had gone down with the laundry, she says, laughing with relief.
Keoghan turns to Boss Man and smiles.
—My mother, he says softly.
Boss Man smiles and then checks the time. Keoghan will have to head to the airport soon. He will fly all night to London. He’s going to see his son.
Story: Ryan D'Agostino
Photos: Norman Jean Roy
Styling: Bill Mullen
Grooming: Christine Nelli using Dior Beauty
Production: Danelle Manthey at Somersault Productions
Tailoring: Joseph Ting
Creative Direction: Nick Sullivan
Design Direction: Rockwell Harwood
Visuals Direction: Justin O'Neill
Executive Director, Entertainment: Randi Peck
Executive Producer, Video: Dorenna Newton
Additional Fashion Credits: In the opening photo, jacket and trousers by Dolce & Gabbana; Square Bang Unico Sapphire watch by Hublot; necklace is Keoghan's own. In the video, jacket, vest, shirt, and trousers by Ralph Lauren Purple Label; tie by Title of Work; watch by Vacheron Constantin.
