To mark his latest performance in Andrea Arnold’s Bird, Liam Maguren looks back at the films that made us love Barry Keoghan.
Every so often, we’re graced with a fantastic actor sporting a remarkably distinguishable face you can sum up in one word. Tom Cruise? “Photogenic.” Paul Dano? “Punchable.” Will Poulter? “Pointy.”
Barry Keoghan though? I don’t think one word could do this particular actor, or his distinctive look, justice.
Hot Rodent Man got thrown around by Gen Z last year to describe the Irish acting talent and male stars of a similar complexion. Think of The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White and Challengers’ Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist—slender, sun-deprived men with beady eyes and shaggy hair that could high-five you with their ears. The look subverts conventional ideas of male handsomeness and I’m here for it.
But that doesn’t fully define Keoghan’s pull. There’s an added, mysterious, magnetic quality that comes through in all his performances. Something about his arresting ability to stare through people, or the eerily calm tone of his voice, or the way he tenderly tongues a drain hole, makes him an endlessly fascinating presence on screen.
How did we fall in love with this guy? Let’s journey backwards through five of Keoghan’s most impactful roles, starting with his latest.
Bird
Andrea Arnold, a filmmaker well versed in exploring caged characters and their yearning for freedom, delivers another excellent piece of social realism that tiptoes along the edges of a fairy tale. The film centres on 12-year-old Bailey, raised in a squat in northern Kent, where she’s very much the parent in the family. Moving into adolescence, Bailey searches for more in life—attention, experiences, adventure—which leads her to Bird (a sublime Franz Rogowski), an elusive man who’s on his own search for his parents.
Keoghan plays Bailey’s dad, the wonderfully named Bug who has bug tattoos all over his often-shirtless body. If that sounds like a real dropkick of a man, you wouldn’t be wrong, with Keoghan relishing in the man-child-ness of the character (him and his lads singing Coldplay’s Yellow to a toad is a real highlight). The man shouldn’t be likeable, but against all odds, Keoghan cuts through the thin deadbeat dad stereotype by showing just enough compassion and sweetness to build a more grounded person.
I still wouldn’t trust Bug with my wallet, but I’d absolutely belt out Speed of Sound with him at a drunken karaoke night.
Saltburn
Writer-director Emerald Fennell followed up her Oscar-winning debut Promising Young Woman with this spicy tale powered by eroticism and an eat-the-rich mentality. Keoghan leads the film as a young man who essentially pulls a one-man Parasite by infiltrating the titular estate of an aristocratic family through his friendship with a fellow Oxford student (Jacob Elordi, Priscilla). Over one summer, the family’s dire dynamic and hidden motives contort in suspenseful and hard-to-forget ways.
With a cast that includes heavy hitters like Carey Mulligan, Richard E. Grant, and Rosamund Pike, Keoghan still manages to stand tall with a mesmerising and committed performance. The role demands multiple personas as well as an ever-present sense that “this guy’s up to something,” with Keoghan effortlessly swerving from bashful nerd one moment and seductive freak machine the next.
A lot’s been said about the film’s wobbly finale, but even if you see it as an act of self-sabotaged, you have to admit: the final shot with Keoghan in all his glory was kinda perfect.
The Banshees of Inisherin
Martin McDonagh earned nine Academy Award nominations (taking home none, sadly) for this Guinness-dark existential dramedy about the sudden breakdown of a lifelong friendship. Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson deliver career-topping performances as Pádraic and Colm respectively. Pádraic’s a “dull” man fighting tooth and nail to get his best mate to explain why he doesn’t want to be mates anymore. Colm wants none of that, threatening to chop off one of his own fingers every time Pádraic talks to him.
Keoghan plays Dominic who, in some ways, is to Pádraic what Pádraic is to Colm—a dumb-dumb friend with good intentions but little chemistry between them. Dominic’s an open mouth eater and constant brain-farter who reckons Pádraic should call Colm’s bluff because “worse comes to worse, he can still play the fiddle with four fingers, I betcha.” It’s funny stuff, with Keoghan ripping into every killer line in McDonagh’s script.
But what really earned him the Oscar nomination for this role? Probably the way he said: “Well, there goes that dream.” He makes it sound so simple, but his pauses and agitations signal an innocent young man trying to cover the site of his heart breaking. A bitterly beautiful piece of acting.
American Animals
Bart Layton’s outstanding doco-drama hybrid reconstructs a peculiar heist as recalled by the men who attempted it. The case follows four university students who, upon discovering a valuable book in a low-security library, make a plan to steal it. Keoghan, Evan Peters, Blake Jenner, and Jared Abrahamson play the robbers, with the actual men telling the story in the interview chair.
Keoghan’s character is the closest we get to a voice of reason. It doesn’t excuse the man’s actions, but this vital performance shows how a young American lad with a healthy upbringing could warp his perspective just enough to be convinced that committing a crime like this is worth it.
It’s not a showy performance, but American Animals does show that Keoghan’s very capable of playing a Normal Human Being.
The Killing of a Sacred Deer
Right before his anointment as an Oscar darling filmmaker, writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster, The Favourite, Poor Things) got very freaky with this off-kilter medical horror. Colin Farrell plays a surgeon who loses a patient on the operating table. Shortly after, the dead man’s teenage son (Keoghan) enters the surgeon’s life, bringing with him a nightmarish form of punishment that plagues the man’s family.
A fantastic breakout performance from Keoghan, the young actor played this devilishly creepy role not with a scream but a slither. His intimidation comes not just from the frightening things he says, but the calm and composed way he says them, all while he shoots a stare that’s both blank and dagger-sharp.
Dude also eats spaghetti like he’s in a Goya painting. Great stuff.
