“I’ll never get away”: the one role that will haunt Barry Keoghan forever
The last few years have been pretty damn wild for Barry Keoghan, and while he might divide opinion, you can’t deny that he’s come a very long way in a short space of time.
Since 2022, he’s been nominated for an Oscar, dated the world’s most famous popstar, had sex with a grave, teased himself as the new Joker, joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe (in one of its worst films), been cast as a Beatle, and gotten his cock out in front of millions of paying customers, which is quite the range.
One of the earliest roles in his remarkable career was on an Irish crime drama called Love/Hate, set in Dublin’s criminal underbelly, which wasn’t immediately beloved, but quickly developed a strong fanbase across its second and third seasons. It won 19 times at the Irish Film & Television Awards (IFTAs) and features other Irish luminaries such as Robert Sheehan, Caoilfhionn Dunne, and Aidan Gillen. Keoghan joined the cast in season four as Wayne Cardiff, a brutish young man who thinks he’s a big-time gangster, and, as you can imagine, this arrogance comes back to bite him.
Despite appearing in just six episodes of the show, Wayne is easily the most infamous character in Love/Hate history, where in the premiere episode of season four, he callously shoots a cat in cold blood. The incident sparked outrage across Ireland, with broadcaster RTÉ receiving over 100 complaints from irate fans, and as for Keoghan, he’s been haunted by this moment ever since.
“I’ll never get away from that cat,” he told The Mirror in 2024, over a decade since the episode aired, “I was in the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey about two years ago. I think there was about 90,000 people there, and someone pulled me and said, ‘You’re the guy that shot the cat’. I just thought ‘Ah, here, I’m halfway across the world and someone said it’.”
It’s hard to overstate just how big a deal the cat scene was in Ireland at the time, as that episode of Love/Hate was watched by over one million people, which was around a quarter of the entire population at the time.
Animal rights groups were up in arms at the scene, even though they probably should have been more worried about the teenager with a machine gun, and the cat even appeared on The Late Late Show, one of the country’s most popular live studio shows.
A character like Wayne is both a blessing and a curse to a young actor; it gets their name and face out there, but there will always be people whose knowledge begins and ends at that early appearance. Robin Williams used to joke that it would take a matter of weeks after one of his movies was released for people to revert to calling him ‘Mork’, and he didn’t even murder any animals on his show…that we know of.
No matter how big he gets, there will always be some people who know Barry Keoghan as the ‘Love/Hate cat killer’, and that’s a fact he’s just going to have to live with.
