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I'm supposed to meet Barry Keoghan at 9:30 in the morning at a boxing club just off Melrose Avenue in Hollywood, so I can watch him do the thing he loved most to do before he started acting, and maybe do it with him. We’d met for the first time the day before, and at the end of that hang I admitted that I’d never actually boxed. “I’ll show you a good jab or two, my man,” the Dublin-born actor had promised, or cheerfully threatened. But when I roll up at 9:27, Keoghan is already sweaty, invigorated, and finished working out for the day; he’d like to go someplace else.
Around 20 minutes later, he’s stepping onto the rooftop pool deck at the Four Seasons. This is more like it. He’s feeling good—“Feckin’ happy, for once,” he says, sounding like he means it. He drops his boxing gloves under a chaise and stretches out for some sun.
Keoghan lives in London, has a baby son there, but he’s been staying here a while, living the abstract pampered life of an actor doing the promo rounds for a buzzy awards-season movie that’s expanding from seven screens to 1,500-plus on the day we meet. He digs LA, a good place to howl at the moon: “I howl every night, man. Wooooo.” He laughs—maybe not every night. (The root of “Keoghan” is “cano,” which means “wolf cub” in Gaelic. “It’s crazy, man,” Keoghan says. “It’s crazy, the connection—me and wolves.”) But last night, he says, he just looked out at the Hollywood sign, having a moment: “Just takin’ it all in, man. There’s a gorgeous feelin’ here. This mystic kind of haze. This subtle thing I feel here—it’s like a romance I hold with it. I’m in love with it.”
His movie is called Saltburn, it’s directed to maximum provocative effect by Emerald Fennell, and Keoghan is in every scene as Oliver, a nerd who annihilates a family of upper-crusty British twits from within. The reviews have been all over the place, but most everybody agrees that he’s phenomenal in it, which is true—it’s like watching Marlon Brando’s Last Tango in Paris character slowly take over the body of McLovin. It’s a performance that feels decisive, defining, destined to figure in Keoghan’s lifetime-achievement montages the way, say, The Graduate does in Dustin Hoffman’s, except that Dustin Hoffman does not hang dong on camera at the end of The Graduate, nor does he slurp residual spooge from a bathtub drain, nor does he tearfully fuck the dirt of the fresh grave of a sweet dumb Oxford boy (Jacob Elordi) his character may in some twisted way have loved.
In Fennell’s script, the last stage direction in that scene reads: “Then slowly, weeping, he undresses,” dot dot dot. On the day, Fennell said, she told Keoghan, “I just have the feeling that Oliver would unzip.” Keoghan said, “Yep,” and Fennell cleared the set—not quite knowing where Keoghan would take it. “Unzipping is one thing,” she said—but dot, dot, dot.
“Both of us are really interested in pushing things really far,” Fennell said. “Not in a way that’s just supposed to be deliberately shocking, but because especially if you’re talking about desire, if you’re talking about obsession, you need to get somewhere that feels really hard to watch, because that’s what it feels like. So I think for both of us, the whole time, it was about the understanding between us, and pushing each other always to do something more interesting, more surprising.”
Keoghan is 31, and has been making movies for 13 years, but emerged as an unignorable and undeniable screen presence around 2017, when he turned up in Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer, another film about a nice rich family brought low by a deceptively polite sociopath played by Barry Keoghan. It’s best-of-the-decade work—fearlessly unsympathetic, free of histrionics, and rivetingly real, a showcase for the honesty Keoghan’s past collaborators all say is his greatest quality as an actor.
“He’s creepy and he freaks you out, but it’s truthful and it’s honest,” said Martin McDonagh, who wrote the part of Dominic in 2022’s The Banshees of Inisherin for Keoghan. “He always inhabits a person, warts and all, I think, and he doesn’t try to make you love them. He doesn’t sweeten the pill.”
“Give me truth over craft any day,” said Colin Farrell, Keoghan’s costar in both Sacred Deer and Banshees, “and that’s what Barry brings. Truth. It’s innate. He lays it all out there in an instinctual way and it just gets deeper and deeper.”
“Not everybody is willing to show the world who they are,” said director Chloé Zhao, who cast Keoghan as an ageless Marvel Universe superbeing in 2021’s Eternals. “I’ve dealt with actors like that. But Barry, right away, I thought, This is not someone who’s afraid to put everything that he is onscreen—the good, bad, and ugly. That’s actually a lot rarer than you think. And he doesn’t protect himself with techniques. He doesn’t fall behind conventions that keep him safe.”
Eternals, sprawling and mythic and melancholy, worlds away in tone from the zingy, synergized noisiness of the MCU, was still a Marvel movie, a mammoth money-burning machine—but Keoghan gives a funny, mercurial performance in it. He’s not there to pad his résumé; he actually acts.
“He’s so present that he brought out things—whether the other cast members like it or not, he pushed them. He’s able to bring things out of them, because he’s not completely predictable,” Zhao said. On a film of Eternals’ scope, with the meter running, there’s something to be said for predictable actors. “When he shows up, it’s not always what you expect, and there are challenges around that. But the life force he brings in is a kind of wildness that keeps a lot of those moments alive.”
“It’s just this unique, unique spirit that’s almost like his body can’t contain it. It’s got to be channeled out in a way that’s healthy,” Zhao said. “This is someone that carries so much trauma, and so much generational emotion, and I feel for him, so much more than just as an actor, but as a person. So I’m so glad to see that he’s found a way to channel that.”
Even before civilians could see it last fall, Saltburn was already a cultural moment, and Keoghan’s on- and off-screen chemistry with Elordi had become the stuff of memes. Many of these riff on how fun-sized Keoghan, five-foot-eight, looks when he’s photographed with the towering Elordi; people post, like, Gandalf hanging out with Frodo, or Joe Biden dwarfing Rosalynn Carter, and write, “Every photo of Barry Keoghan and Jacob Elordi looks like this.” Keoghan has seen these, finds them funny; the other day he even reposted one on his Instagram: a shot of Timothée Chalamet cradling a Paddington Bear.
But some of the attention paid Elordi and Keoghan online comes from a slightly less innocent place, born of daydreams about these two men being, let’s say, the big and little spoon in a relationship that transcends the professional. It’s a notion the actors have done a fair amount to encourage: Not since Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix on the My Own Private Idaho press tour have two ostensibly straight actors been so unselfconsciously coquettish (bro-quettish?) while promoting a movie; when Keoghan and Elordi leaned in for a jovial almost-kiss on the red carpet at Saltburn’s LA premiere, the thirst this stoked on social media could have drained the Irish Sea.
If they seem flirtatious, Keoghan tells me, there’s a good explanation: “I’m really flirtin’, ” he says with a smile. “We were constantly close,” Keoghan says. “It ain’t just for the cameras and the premiere[s]. Me and Jacob—he’s like a brother to me, honestly. I think when you’re comfortable with someone, you can be as close as you want, you know what I mean? It’s not like, ‘Oh, don’t come near me’—it’s like, I’m comfortable. When I’m comfortable around people, I’m comfy.”
Did you have anything like that with guys you knew growing up?
“Yeah, no,” Keoghan says, then chuckles, presumably imagining how all this comfiness would’ve gone over in Irish Catholic Dublin. “But I’m comfortable with Jacob. Messin’ about. Havin’ a laugh. We’re bein’ lads. We’ve just done a movie where we had to kiss, man. Look at the scenes we’ve done. You have to be comfortable with yourself.”
Some critics have pointed out that Keoghan—who was almost 30 when Saltburn began shooting—is a hair too old and maybe a bit too ripped to be fully convincing as a nerdy Oxford freshman. It’s a choice that doesn’t fully make sense until the end of the film, when Oliver, now a grown adult who’s taken possession of a stately English manor by picking off anyone else with a claim to it, dances through that house’s halls with his dick out. This perverse coming-of-age movie feels like a coming-of-age moment for its star as well; it’s Keoghan showing his manhood figuratively as well as literally.
I ask Keoghan what it feels like to be presented onscreen—for the first time, really—as something other than a boy.
“It’s nice, man,” he says. “It’s nice not just being looked at as the weird-looking guy, the unique feckin’ freaky little freak man-child, freak child-man, whatever you want to call it. It’s nice to see people kind of look at you in that way. I’ll be honest. It is nice.
“My prettiness didn’t get me this far,” he says, but he’s conscious that being someone audiences want to look at “opens up other lanes for me—it’s part of the leading man thing.”
You mastered the “little freak” era…
“Little freak child-man era, as we call it. And now I’m just Man. Freak-Man. Man-Freak.”
The Man-Freak picks up my digital recorder from the table and speaks right into the mic, announcing his readiness to go deep:
“Hello, GQ,” he says. “I am present today, let me tell ya—I’m present.” The p’s pop loud, distorting into the red. “I’m gonna give ya more than what you asked for.”
“It’s a big moment for me—it’s GQ. It’s a massive moment,” he says. “I wrote this down in my to-do list—to be onna cover of GQ. I’m not even shittin’ you. I wrote that down.”
Keoghan does this: puts things on to-do lists, so as to call them forth from the universe, or hypnotize himself into walking toward that goal. He believes in manifesting, in part because it seems to have worked for him. In his phone, he keeps a list of directors he’d like to work with, and once upon a time Martin McDonagh and Chloé Zhao and Emerald Fennell were all on it. I ask if he’s having trouble coming up with new things to dream toward, and he says no: “I don’t want to get to a place of fulfillment, weirdly. I want to keep chasing this fucking thing, whatever it is.”
He wants to be challenged, respected, remembered, recognized for his craft, for pushing himself, pushing his limits. “Those boundaries within yourself—like, Can I do this? This role is physical, this role requires this accent,” he says. “I’d love to do a part where I’ve physically transformed.”
You want to Christian Bale it, I say. Inside and out.
Keoghan laughs. “I’m-a Christian Bale that. Daniel Day-Lewis that!”
He met Day-Lewis once. Keoghan was in the reception area at a steam room in Brooklyn, and this young guy recognized him, and said he was a fan of Keoghan’s work, and that his father was a fan, too, and when the guy mentioned that his father was an actor, Keoghan said, Oh, really? What’s he done, and the guy said, “Uh, My Left Foot…” and Keoghan said, Nahhhhh. And then the guy—Day-Lewis’s son Gabriel-Kane, also an actor—said he’d be glad to introduce them, and Keoghan said he’d love that, and thought nothing more about it until the next day, when he again found himself waiting outside the same steam room and up walked a figure in “this lovely gray coat,” Keoghan remembers. It was Day-Lewis—Lincoln and Daniel Plainview and Bill the Butcher himself. “He’s like, ‘Barry, I just want to say I’m a massive fan—I watch all your work,’ ” Keoghan says. “I was like, ‘Gimme a second, Daniel—I can’t really talk.’ He was nothing but nice, man—I think he said, Come over and have dinner with us sometime. And then COVID hit and I went back to Ireland. But that was a great one, man. He’s the top, for me.”
The thirst tweets, the accolades, Daniel feckin’ Day-Lewis giving you props: Keoghan is honest about enjoying it, but knows he’s not supposed to enjoy it too much. “You can get caught up in it, and it’s kind of dangerous in that sense,” he says. This is why he makes his hotel bed every morning, even though he knows the staff will come around and change it themselves. “It’s just to start your day good, to kind of bring you back to gravity,” he says. “At least I’ve made it. It’s small, simple stuff like that, keeps you from floating away.”
He reaches up, fingers a quarter--inch nick just below his eyebrow. “Got a little cut in sparring,” he says.
Don’t touch it, I say. “Is it bad?” Keoghan asks. I tell him no, that it looks fine, like it’ll close up if he leaves it alone. I joke that he needs a cut man in his corner; Keoghan says, “Funny you should mention that.” He tells me about a movie he wants to make. “It’s called The Cut Man. It’s about my upbringing.”
The project is in its early days, Keoghan says, but the story will be “sort of centered around my life,” which means—assuming it’s mostly faithful to Keoghan’s actual arc—that it’ll be about a kid from the dead center of Dublin who grows up without a father, loses his mother, Debbie, to a heroin overdose, bounces around the foster-care system with his brother for seven years, finally moves in with his grandmother, becomes fascinated for reasons he at first can’t articulate by old films on television, stays up late eating Rice Krispies and watching the way Marlon Brando and James Dean and Paul Newman speak and move and hold the screen, and eventually finds himself, first in a boxing ring and eventually on a film set. If you were writing this movie, chances are you’d end it there, where the Dickensian rough-and--tumble of the underdog protagonist’s youth gives way to the wide-openness of a life in art, to once-unthinkable possibilities; ending it, say, at the Oscars—where his performance in The Banshees of Inisherin took him—or with Keoghan posted up at the Four Seasons, might strain credulity.
“It’s crazy when I think of it,” Keoghan says of the ride he’s on. “I was saying to my friend last night—I was just looking out at the [Hollywood] sign and, y’know, I wanted this as a kid. I dunno why I wanted it, but I wanted it. It brings back memories, in a weird way—it’s hard to have memories of a place you’ve not been in, but I watched all those old movies, and was fascinated by Old Hollywood. This was stuff I dreamt of, as a kid.”
Which is not to say it feels good all the time, necessarily.
“There’s a loneliness as well, that comes with this,” Keoghan says. “A massive loneliness. It’s hard not to talk about that, or to pretend that’s not there.” It caught up with him in November when he walked the red carpet in Prada at the Saltburn premiere in New York. “One of the noisiest, busiest cities in the world,” he says, “but for me it was like, I’m in that place on my own—the only person in New York, at some points.”
Who do you think about, when you’re alone like that?
“When I’m isolated?” Keoghan says. “Obviously, my mother. My mother, always. She’s many years passed now, but I always think about her anyway. It’s always just in and around achievements that it’s really prominent—’cause you’d like to celebrate that wit’ ’er, y’know?”
Did she know you wanted to do this kind of work?
“No, no, no,” Keoghan says, and laughs, as if Debbie would be tickled to see it. She did know he liked performing, he says. She always called him “little Timmy”—“I don’t know why,” Keoghan says. “She’d be like, ‘Where’s my little Timmy?’ I’d love to make her laugh, and just dance for her.”
She died when he was 12. She wasn’t really in his life by the time it happened. “She was in the hospital,” Keoghan says. “She was battlin’ a lot of stuff.”
Later, Keoghan will tell me about meeting Leonardo DiCaprio—who was very cool, he says: “They say never meet your heroes, but nah”—and when I ask him what his favorite DiCaprio performance is, he’ll say The Basketball Diaries. “I loved What’s Eating Gilbert Grape,” he tells me, “but Basketball Diaries, for me, there was a personal connection—with my mother being on heroin. I really could relate to it, a lot. There’s a scene where he comes to the door and he’s begging his mom, can he come in? I was witness to that—that happened at my granny’s house, ’cause my granny was my mother’s mother. And it was similar. It hit home for me.”
By then he was out of foster care, living full-time with his grandmother, his aunt, and his cousin, who moved into her mother’s room so Keoghan and his brother could have hers.
Keoghan laughs. “Now she has her bedroom back, finally,” he says. “Not that I’ve got them their own house yet—but now that’s coming. At some point. Definitely making that happen.”
A lot of people have a story like this one, in Keoghan’s neighborhood. “Dublin 1, we call it—the postcode is 1,” he says. “It’s proper inner city. It’s the heart, man. And y’know, every inner city has its problems and faces its battles. Everyone’s kind of going through the same stuff there.”
He looks out at the pool water, sun-kissed and blue. “This is such a contrast to where I come from,” he says. “I mean, this is such a contrast to where anyone comes from. It’s not real. This is not real, is it? It can’t be real. I’m gonna wake up right now. In a second, I’ll be like, ‘Fuck, man—that was some dream.’ ”
He knows how it sounds. A kid from painful circumstances sees a flyer in a shop window next door to the local boxing club, somebody looking to cast a little film. “They were looking for, like, nonactors,” Keoghan says, “and they were looking to see if you had a dirt bike. And I had two of those—I was a nonactor, and I had a dirt bike.” He calls the number from his granny’s mobile phone, auditions, gets cast in his first movie, 2011’s Between the Canals. He knows how far-fetched it sounds, how feckin’ corny: “But it’s not like I rang the number and instantly, y’know, I’m in Hollywood, a star.” He did 10-plus years of work, between there and here.
He wasn’t, strictly speaking, a nonactor when he called. He’d been in school plays every Christmas—silly parts, kid stuff, rapscallions tormenting the babysitter. The material was not the point. “I loved getting up there,” he says, “and being someone else and having that engagement with the audience, that control. Time was almost not moving, if you get what I’m saying—when I was onstage, it was like a timeless feeling.”
But when he wasn’t acting, he was acting out. “Not in a bad way—just being a little brat, basically, and not payin’ attention,” Keoghan says. “Playin’ characters, drawin’ stuff on the walls, imitating teachers, being the class clown.” At some point, seeking discipline that might hurt, the school barred him from the stage for a while. “I was like, Oh, that’s my acting career over,” Keoghan says. “And I really thought it was.”
For the past few years he’s taken medication for ADHD; I suggest that he had it back then and nobody knew it. Keoghan laughs. “Everyone knew it,” he says, “but I didn’t know it.”
I ask him about that word—control—and if what he means is self-control.
“No,” he says. “Like, I can deliver the lines when I want. I can control the pace of how the dialogue’s going. I can do anything I want up here, basically. Like, they’re waiting on me. And when you get laughs—it made me feel relevant…. You feel heard and seen. At the center of it. Where I was supposed to be. That’s the best way to put it. Nothing else mattered at that time. I get that with boxing—I get that looseness, that feeling of timelessness. That present feeling. It’s magical. And you chase that.”
The sun’s directly above the pool now. Barry says he’d like to move—into the shade, I’m assuming, but no: “I was thinking we could sit over there in the sun! I wanna sit directly in it—I wanna get a bit of color, man, you know what I mean?”
We stake out a cabana with better, hotter exposure. Keoghan peels off his shirt, revealing a slightly pale, compactly muscled chest and the gnarly scar tissue that winds its way up his arm like a snake tattoo. A souvenir from a case of necrotizing fasciitis—a.k.a. flesh-eating disease—he caught a few years ago, right before The Banshees of Inisherin started shooting. One in five cases are fatal; amputation, he says, was on the table. He remembers saying to the doctors, But I’m not gonna die, right? and the doctors saying, Well, we don’t know. McDonagh remembers coming to see him just before shooting was set to begin.
“I’m not sure if he was on a lot of meds, but he seemed to shrug it off,” McDonagh said. “We were only about four days out from shooting, and his arm was puffed up. But he was like, ‘Yeah, no, I’m going to be fine—I’ll see you on Tuesday.’ I went to the hospital thinking, Shit—is he going to die? Let alone, is he going to make the movie. But I came out of there energized and looking forward to it.”
Keoghan remembers the heart monitor beeping in the background and McDonagh saying, Just remember this when you’ve been nominated for an Oscar. Which of course is exactly what happened. He lost, to Ke Huy Quan, but it’s an honor just to be nominated, plus he got to keep his arm.
Say something out loud, call it forth from the universe. Because he’s done it in every interview, often prophetically, I ask him to run down who’s left on the list of directors in his phone. “Barry Jenkins,” he says. “Paul Thomas Anderson. Christopher Nolan, again. Yorgos again, obviously. Lynne Ramsay. Chloé Zhao again. Martin McDonagh, obviously, again. Greta Gerwig, as well—I’d love to work with Greta. I think she’s fucking incredible.”
He’d like to work with Steven Spielberg too. They’ve met a few times—the first was years ago, when Spielberg was casting Ready Player One. “I remember doing the screen test, and he had a little camcorder in his hand, and I was like, This is insane. Steven Spielberg is filming me doing a scene, on a camcorder. ”
He didn’t get that part, but this year he’s come one step closer to working with the man—Spielberg and Tom Hanks produced the Apple TV+ series Masters of the Air, about the World War II–era B-17 bomber pilots of the Air Force’s 100th Bombardment Group, known as the Bloody Hundredth, and in that series Keoghan plays Lt. Curtis R. Biddick, fictionalized here as a scrapper with a Brooklyn accent. Between setups, on a massive set outside London, he and costar Austin Butler knocked each other around a little. “I learned him how to box,” Keoghan says. “He was pretty good.”
“I always wanted to play a pilot,” Keoghan says. He was in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, years ago, as poor doomed George Mills, who sails across the English Channel in a pleasure boat to rescue trapped British soldiers —but the coolest role in that film is Tom Hardy, up there in that fighter plane, emoting through an oxygen mask, which was part of why Keoghan wanted to be in Masters: “If you can convey your emotions, what you’re feeling, with just your eyes, it’s powerful. I’d constantly say to Austin, I’m Tom Hardy today, right? You think it? He’d be like, Yeah, you’re definitely Tom Hardy today.”
He knows his eyes are an asset. They’re pretty, but they’re also precision instruments. He’s got this uncanny way of purging them of all empathy. Emerald Fennell compares them to a shark’s eyes.
“It’s like the double lid that sharks have,” Fennell said. “The attack mode. The actual change is on a molecular level, but it’s profound. And when you’re that close—because I love shooting very, very, very close up—you need somebody who’s that kind of gifted, where the tiniest things can change everything.”
Keoghan’s son, in photos, looks to have the Keoghan eyes. His name is Brando. He was born right in the middle of shooting on Saltburn; Keoghan managed to get away for that one day. “They gave me a day off,” he says, laughing. “Good on them! Day off, and straight on to night shoots and night feedings—boom!”
You can see it on his face, he thinks. “You see me tired,” he says. “Yeah. Brando. Good ol’ Brando.”
He gets a little quieter, pulling inward. “It was probably the best time of my life, to be quite fair. Havin’ a baby boy, and leadin’ a movie. It was the best time of my life, I must say—yeah.”
This was barely a year and a half ago, but he talks about that time like it’s very far away, which is maybe how it feels. Brando’s mother, Alyson Sandro, was Keoghan’s girlfriend at the time; in July the UK tabloids reported that they’d split. “She’s done a great job and she’s an incredible mother,” Keoghan says, offering nothing further.
He says it hasn’t changed him, but it does affect the choices he makes, how long he’s willing to be off somewhere on location. “I feel a responsibility. I feel an enormous amount of pressure, which is good. And I can’t get the little boy off my mind. It’s beautiful. Y’know, it’s crazy, but when he looks at you, you feel like the most important person in the world. That’s the effect he has on me. He smiles at you and you’re like, Wow. You’re smiling at me like that? I don’t deserve that, but anyways, thanks.”
How old is he now?
“Fifteen months. Brando Keoghan. Imagine that, for a name! I set him up. Brando Keoghan, piano player! I obviously love Marlon Brando, but I just, yeah—for a first name I thought it was quite cool. To have Brando in your name— feckin’ hell, man! He’s got a lot to live up to, that kid,” Keoghan says, then adds, confidently, grinning: “But he’ll live up to it. He has to have that leather jacket and that rock-star attitude, you know what I mean? He’ll have a motorbike when he’s 12, I think.”
Right. It seemed like a good idea when he was a little baby, but when he’s 12, and walking around like he’s in The Wild One…
“He’ll have a toothpick [in his mouth] walking around seventh grade,” Keoghan says, laughing. “He’ll probably have a toothpick when I get home!”
They grow up so fast. “Fuck you, Dad!”
“Aww, God,” Keoghan says. “Dad, you’re a shit actor. You can’t do accents.”
And maybe this is where Keoghan’s movie should really end—Barry in the mystic haze on some far-off golden shore, his son’s name rolling off his tongue, sleeping in a bed he’ll make tomorrow.
He does not know what’s next. He has one more movie in the can—it’s called Bird, and he made it right after Saltburn, with Andrea Arnold, who made Fish Tank and American Honey, and he won’t say what it’s about. He dropped out of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator 2 to make it—which was a scheduling decision, he says, not a what-kind-of-actor-am-I decision, although Andrea Arnold was one of the directors on his list. After that, he’ll wait and see what comes of Saltburn, now that it’s out there.
There is one script he’s excited about, he says, for a movie about the life of Henry McCarty, who went by William H. Bonney and went down in history as Billy the Kid. It’s by Hunter Andrews, who also wrote The Cut Man for Keoghan; Bart Layton, who made American Animals with Keoghan, is set to direct. “We’re looking at which studio we want to settle with,” Keoghan says. “We wanted to wait till Saltburn came out, because we want to surround me with really good, interesting actors—but we want those actors to also feel that the person leading that movie can lead a movie. It was a question I wanted to ask as well—can I lead a movie? Can I keep [people] engaged? And the reaction’s been good so far, so now we’re gonna approach the actors we want.”
He’s been a Billy fan since childhood, he says. Feels some kinship. Billy was of Irish descent, lost his mother young and his father even younger. “And he kind of went around the care system as well, a little. But the Billy the Kid version we’re trying to tell is, y’know, beneath the façade, beneath that mythical character. Not making it so cool, like, Oh, my God, he’s the best gunslinger. Humanizing him, making him real.”
“That is happening,” Keoghan says, “so expect to see these baby blues with the cowboy hat.”
He pulls out his phone. “There’s actually only one picture of him out there, ever—one picture, and I kind of look like him. It’s crazy. He’s got dark hair. Let’s see. I’ll show you.”
He googles, scrolls, hands me the phone, a grainy colorized ferrotype photo on the screen—Billy in a slouch hat, leaning on a Winchester rifle.
“Look from the eyes,” Keoghan says, “like from the nose up. You know what I’m saying? It’s crazy. There’s the one picture of him and, like, that feckin’ looks like me. And I’m a bit of a Billy the Kid, in life. So we’re gonna do that. The outlaw! And the kid. The kid inside him.”
Alex Pappademas is GQ’s senior culture editor.
A version of this story originally appeared in the February 2023 issue of GQ with the title “Barry Keoghan’s Wild Ride”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Jason Nocito
Styled by Taylor McNeill
Hair by Tomo Jidai using Oribe
Skin by Charlotte Willer at Home Agency
Set design by Rosie Turnbull
Produced by Hen’s Tooth Productions
