Barry Keoghan reveals his tough childhood still “haunts” him
Irish actor Barry Keoghan burst onto the scene several years ago and has become one of the most promising young talents in Hollywood, but it’s been a challenging road to get to this position.
Early roles in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk and Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer demonstrated his potential, while his supporting role in Martin McDonagh’s 2023 movie The Banshees of Inisherin earned him an Oscar nomination. More recently, he’s taken starring roles in buzzy films like Emerald Fennell’s 2023 satire, Saltburn.
However, Keoghan’s journey to becoming one of Hollywood’s brightest young stars has not followed a familiar path of a comfortable middle class upbringing and a drama school education. Born in the inner city neighbourhood of Summerhill in Dublin, he spent a large part of his youth in foster care before his grandmother took him in at age nine. When he was 12, his mother died of a heroin overdose.
In an appearance on The Louis Theroux Podcast on November 5th, Keoghan spoke about his challenging childhood, how it’s been misconstrued in the press, and how it still looms large in his life and work.
“I feel it’s been publicised in a pity story way,” he said. “You know, ‘Oh God bless him, his mum passed away [from] heroin and touring foster homes,’ [I’ve] actually seen that on an article. I’m not giving out about any of that but that’s not what I’m looking for either. If anything, I speak about it to let younger kids know that no matter where you come from, you can always achieve what you put your mind to and not to give up and stay persistent on it.”
When speaking about his experience living with more than a dozen different foster families, he stressed that “they were all incredible,” but that all the moving around made him develop trust issues that he’s only just getting to grips with.
“I never trusted when someone said they love me,” Keoghan said. “I never trusted the process ever. I’d always think, ‘Nah, this isn’t, this isn’t real.’ I’m very aware of it and walking through therapy but I’m just getting around to it. Trust is a massive thing.”
But he stressed that he’s never blamed his mother for the hardship he endured as a child. Instead, he noted that her addiction had a lot to do with the area they lived in.
“My mum, she was lovely,” he remembered. “She was gorgeous, almost like six-foot, dark hair, just beautiful. Like every lad was chasing her and this thing caught her, like many families. It’s sad to see the deterioration of people around the area and see people kind of struggle with it and the recovery they’re in now. It caught my mum, it caught my uncle who died of it and caught my father as well. She was just unable to look after us..”
He continued, “That kind of haunts me still, you don’t forget those things. You don’t forget waiting on the social worker steps and waiting for the new family to come and play with you in the playground they have in the office and see if it’s going to work and then go with them to a whole new area and a whole new home. […] And you know, the car journeys there and they’re the things that haunt and I don’t blame her. It’s a sickness.”
How Barry Keoghan mines those experiences into his acting
These memories, he said, inform his work as an actor, even if he feels uncomfortable about it sometimes.
“The method I use is, I try to recreate and I try to bring real emotion to it. I’m feeling and thinking of things in the past and bring it to the surface and use it and it can scare you in a way, but you can also feel like a little bit of a sell out,” Keoghan said.
He added, “I do therapy and I’ve got a good way of managing stuff now in a really nice way. I can vent a lot and get a lot of closure but often the times you’re left with a lot of stuff […] But I like to get that kind of therapeutic experience in a way from it. It’s a weird thing. I want to have something to draw from. So I don’t want to go back and have closure on everything.”
Barry Keoghan’s plans to build a youth centre in Summerhill
Although many might choose to get as far away from those memories as possible, Keoghan said that he wants to build a youth centre in his childhood neighbourhood with fellow Summerhill native, Olympic boxing medalist Kelly Harrington.
“There’s not a big opportunity there,” the actor said. “I want to go back and set up some sort of a youth club and employ people from around the area and set up some classes, not only for acting. Me and Kelly have discussed about maybe doing boxing and acting and other stuff that give kids a chance to go to this place after school and have some food and if they want to work on being a stylist or just kind of nurture that and kind of let them see that there’s a chance for that as well.”
In the meantime, has a full slate of movies in the pipeline, including a Peaky Blinders film and the upcoming Andrea Arnold release, Bird.
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