Jan 21, 2024 at 12:27 pm
Barry Keoghan recently set tongues wagging when he featured in Saltburn danced naked Murder On The Dancefloor. The 31-year-old Irish actor has been working on his career for a while, but his success certainly did not fall into his lap.
Keoghan has anything but an easy childhood. He grew up in Dublin and ended up in foster care with his brother at the age of five, because their (single) mother was addicted to drugs. In seven years they lived with thirteen different families and in several orphanages.
According to the actor, although the families are good for him and his brother, it is not a nice way to grow up. “As a child you don’t understand what is going on. As soon as we became attached to a family we had to leave again,” he says a few years ago in The Late Late Show.
When he was 12, his mother died and he moved in with his grandmother. She raises the two brothers together with their aunt.
Despite his difficult childhood, Keoghan does not give up. “Because of my thirteen different homes, you would expect me to make a mess of my life, but I wanted to do the opposite. I don’t want to get stuck in my bad childhood, but use it as my ammunition.”
At sixteen, Keoghan quit school and decided he wanted to become an actor. “I remember thinking, what have I got to lose? The only way is up.” Not much later he got his first film role Between the Canals.
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Keoghan often plays the outsider
Keoghan plays the role of the mischievous misfit with a difficult childhood several times. A character close to him. That’s how he is in Irish film Calm with Horses to be seen as an orphan desperate for parents, and searching for them in a crime family.
In The Killing of a Sacred Deer from 2017, his first major production, he plays a difficult teenager with a deceased father and unhinged mother. That same year he also appeared as a heroic soldier in the war thriller Dunkirk.
The Banshees of Inisherin, in which he plays a village boy who is abused by his father, earned him an Oscar nomination and a BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role.
Since Saltburn was released on Prime Video in December, the internet can’t stop talking about Keoghan. In the film, which is somewhere between an erotic thriller and a black comedy, he takes on the leading role of Oliver.
The student befriends a wealthy classmate who takes him to the estate of his wealthy parents. The sexually explicit scenes and the naked dance to the song Murder On The Dancefloor by Sophie Ellis-Bextor make him one of the most talked about actors of the moment.
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Hoofdrol in film over Billy the Kid
Saltburn does not remain his only leading role for long. Keoghan will also play the lead character in an upcoming film about legendary gunslinger Billy the Kid. That role seems tailor-made for him.
Director Bart Layton’s film focuses on The Kid’s Irish origins. The future marksman, like Keoghan, was orphaned as a teenager and was wanted for murder at the age of eighteen.
“I felt connected to Billy because he was also a mama’s boy. But of course I did something different and turned my circumstances into something positive instead of resisting them,” he tells Deadline.
“There is a soul and vulnerability in Billy that I think is important to show, to better understand him as a real person rather than the myth he has become.”
2024-01-21 11:27:00
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