Barry Keoghan on Saltburn, Sabrina and why he needed a dog

Around the end of 2023, Barry Keoghan was suddenly propelled from the manageable fame that comes with a string of good performances in arthouse films to bumper headline-grabbing notoriety as the guy who drank Jacob Elordi’s bathwater. Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, in which Keoghan plays an Oxford outsider who seduces the rich family of his socially advantaged campus friend, culminates in Keoghan dancing naked through the family’s mansion, which is now his. Heady stuff! It certainly set other tongues wagging.

“I put that commitment and work into whatever I do,” says Keoghan, bouncing up on Zoom. “And some movies get seen more than others, but Saltburn was just a phenomenon. You know, it really was a scary time where I felt like everyone was looking at me. And they were looking at me in that scene, but on the TikTok and the Twitter it was an amazing invasion of privacy.”

Keoghan was then 31. He had a new baby called Brando with former partner Alyson Sandro, a Scottish dentist; he would then date American singer Sabrina Carpenter and the end of their relationship saw a tsunami of online abuse crash on his head. He didn’t make another film for a year, but that didn’t matter: there was plenty of gossip fodder to keep him in focus, vilified and insulted.

When he works, Barry Keoghan says his goal is not to consider himself an actor.

“And I could deactivate everything, but I don’t think I should have to or should do that,” he says. “I’m a curious lad. I like to see what’s been said.” There have been threats. His response was to buy another dog, this time trained for security as well as companionship. “The beauty of it with animals, you’re not getting opinions and not getting judged,” he says. His dog was his comfort as a boy. “I’d sit with him just in hard times, he’d give me his energy and just be there in my space.” He’s very much a dog person.

His new film Bird, directed by Andrea Arnold, is a strange beast. Critics have loved and hated it, largely depending on how they feel about the androgynous faerie stranger (Franz Rogowski) who wanders into a depressed Kent town, befriends the quietly miserable Bailey (Nykiya Adams) and seems to wreak some dark magic on her world before leaving again, apparently using his own wings. Arnold’s name is synonymous with hard-edged realism – her version of Wuthering Heights was surely the muddiest film ever shot in Yorkshire – so this venture into magical realism surprised Cannes audiences.

Barry Keoghan in the film that thrust him into the spotlight, Saltburn.

Keoghan plays Bailey’s father Bug, a man in charge of two children who is still just a lad himself, partying all night in the old building where he has squatted with a bunch of other chancers, and jumping on harebrained schemes to make money, the latest of which is harvesting and selling toad venom as a psychedelic drug. Music blasts through the squat; Bailey seeks peace roaming the marshes, observing small animals and birds. Bug will come to find her on his scooter, try to rustle up something to eat, try to do the right thing.

“He reminds me of my uncle,” Keoghan says. “A selfish man, who doesn’t really have any bad streaks in him, just a selfishness that comes across in different ways. He’s innocent and there’s a lot to learn there, he ain’t the perfect father but who is, you know? A lot of people go ‘oh shit, my father was a bit like that.’ There’s something nice in that because you get it in perspective. It’s a sibling-like relationship, like brother and sister almost. I think he forgets he’s a father sometimes. And I think that’s just honest.”

Colin Farrell (left) and Barry Keoghan in The Banshees of Inisherin.Credit: Searchlight

Honesty is the first word that comes up when discussing Keoghan’s own approach to his work. Now 32, he started acting at school after getting hooked on the old movies his gran watched on TV. By the time he was 18, he was on a TV himself, doing bits, but he has never had any training. Arnold works mostly with non-actors, moulding the script as she goes to fit the people she has cast. “As soon as I met him I thought ‘yeah, I can see him in my world’,” she says. “I felt like I knew him and that he would fit right in and he did. And his performance is very genuine; he’s very immediate and present.”

Perhaps Keoghan’s two most notable film performances, apart from Saltburn, were as the vengeful boy who tears a family apart in The Killing of the Sacred Deer, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, and Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin, where he plays a mild-natured village misfit. Both starred Colin Farrell, who grew up ahead of him but on the same Dublin block; the two of them shared a house while filming Banshees, with Farrell complaining that Keoghan kept raiding his muesli in the middle of the night “like a raccoon” after the pub. His next role, which has the fans particularly excited, is in the movie version of Peaky Blinders. That is still very much under wraps.

Barry Keoghan in his latest film, Bird.

Bird was as different for him as it was for audiences. For a start, he never saw an entire script, only his pages. Arnold keeps writing new versions of each person’s script as they develop the characters. “I’m always looking for new adventures in this world,” says Keoghan. “This is another case of that. No script! Learn your character, go off instincts and just trust me, (meaning Arnold) on that. It’s so spontaneous, it’s so frightening, it’s pure discovery. It’s all of them things.”

Another adventure: Keoghan thinks there were only two other professional actors in the Bird cast. He likes to watch non-actors work. “They bring their own choices to it and you know, they ain’t coming from a trained place. I didn’t come from a trained place either, so watching those choices and those instincts, I’m always questioning them, always asking, ‘Why? What made you think of that? Why did you pick that moment? How did you get so angry so soon?’ Trained actors have their feelings ready and their angles worked out, which way they’re going to face the camera.” Non-actors, by contrast, say it as they see it.

Barry Keoghan in Bird – his first film in which he plays a father.

Keoghan tries to hold on to that in himself. “I don’t know where I got it from or who I got it from, but (my goal) is not to consider myself an actor.” He sees non-actors who, once they have done a couple of films, conscientiously start doing classes “in how to project or sit a certain way. I realised I don’t want that. I think people are drawn to authenticity and in authenticity there is a uniqueness. I’m not trying to be James Dean. I’m trying to find my way of expressing. This is not to shit on training, but there is no right or wrong way to express. No right way to have feelings.”

Keoghan himself is a very kinetic actor, constantly shifting or twitching. He has been diagnosed and takes medication for ADHD, but he puts the movement down to boxing. He says he has learned a good deal about movement from watching animals. “I watch animals a lot, fascinated by how much can be said without vocalising or articulating. Even like babies, I watch babies on screen, in documentaries, who have no camera awareness whatsoever. I always remember thinking I can take that on into a role.”

Barry Keoghan arrives at the 15th Governors Awards in Los Angeles in November 2024. Credit: AP

If there is tension constantly being released in Keoghan’s fidgety performances, that would hardly be surprising. His childhood was distressingly disordered. He never knew his father; his mother Deborah was a heroin addict who died when he was 12, having already been out of his life for years. Between the ages of five and nine, he and his brother went to 13 foster homes before finally being taken in by their grandmother. It isn’t an unusual story for central Dublin, says Keoghan; he tells it only because he wants kids like him to see that they can have a future, even if it doesn’t take them all the way to the Oscars.

He put his energies into boxing, then acting. Both made him feel in control. “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,” he told GQ. “Like, they’re waiting on me. And when you get laughs, you feel heard and seen. At the centre of it.” When he wasn’t on stage, he was usually causing havoc; the only punishment that worked for the school was dropping him from whatever play he was in.

“It’s obviously escapism. It’s like when people drink, when people go out and do stuff like that, it’s escapism,” he says. “And this is a healthy escapism. It’s a healthy form of expressing and releasing stress.” Now he sees film sets as his education. “Moving in creative circles and getting to some euphoric states sometimes and also being out of touch with reality for a good 15 hours, not checking your phone, it does a lot. You grow as a human, you grow as an actor. I’m just very grateful for it.” The rhythm of filmmaking suits him, too. “Because I grew up moving around, I find that quite comfortable. Sub-consciously, I hate settling.

Barry Keoghan at the Toronto International Film Festival for the premiere of Bird in September 2024.Credit: Getty Images

“And being on film sets is a place where you realise that everyone is there for the same reason. Everyone has probably put up with the same shit, of like ‘this is not a real job, go make or do something real’ and now we’re all there together, in that huddle, making movies. My best thing is seeing how many people work on it, every little fecking job, and letting people know you appreciate it.” You can get used to it – to the attention and the free food – very quickly, but he doesn’t want to do that. He makes his hotel bed every morning, even though a maid is going to come in and do it, just to stay grounded.

Bird is the first film in which he plays a father, but having his own child means “there’s not a lot to search”. Nykiya was 12 when they made the movie, meaning Bug would have become a father at 19 or 20, whereas Brando is only two and, as he says, “starting to give backchat”. Even so, his life bleeds into the character. “It humanises it, makes it a little bit more real, makes me have a relationship that’s deeper than any relationship I’ve ever had in any movie I’ve done, because having a daughter or having a son is a lot heavier than having a partner in a movie or whatever, you know.”

He had a barrage of abuse when he and Sandro split, accusing him of being an absentee father. He thinks now that the best way to deter the online haters is to follow up a film like Saltburn with something else, back to back: like a boxer, keep dancing to keep your opponent confused. He didn’t do that because Brando was born during the Saltburn shoot and he had been given just one day off. He needed time with his new child. He never feels pressure to do a job, nor the need to be constantly seen. “Time is an asset. It can be a benefit for you, to learn about yourself and grow, to change physically,” he says.

Besides, all that honesty takes its toll. “Every time that you sign up for a movie, it’s giving a part of you away, so that you want to reserve a little,” he says. “You rush to find these things in you to put forward, things that were born in you, turning them stale. You go back to memories that you want to keep for yourself, but you use them in the creative process to get you into a certain place. So I think less is best – and you’ve to get something from it yourself. It shouldn’t always be for others because I need to learn.”