After a few years as a slow-burn revelation, he went on to establish himself in leading roles, notably in Andrea Arnold’s “Bird”, and soon at the top of Hollywood.
As he sits down to begin the interview, Barry Keoghan jokingly puts on a strong American accent: “Come on, I’ll do the whole interview like this.” He must be thinking a lot about that accent lately, which has not always been a useful tool for British up-and-comers called upon to become Americanized, and forced to shed their UK intonations for variably successful results (Keira Knightley in Domino – sorry not sorry). Keoghan, for his part, isn’t too keen on giving up his Dublin ‘fecking’. Andrea Arnold has kept them intact in Bird, although the action takes place in Kent, in a seaside and working-class region that evokes a kind of English Calabria. « But there are a lot of Irish people in the area, who go there on vacation or who have moved there, » he explains: we don’t ask ourselves any more questions and accept the singularity, in the manner of Raphaël Quenard’s Dauphinois accent in the Languedoc of Junkyard Dog.
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The role of this young father living in a squat with his already teenage children, swarms of friends, and the woman he’s about to marry, much to his daughter’s chagrin, echoes the instability of his own childhood. “I don’t want to go into painful details, you’ll find it all on the internet anyway.” From his youth in Dublin’s poorest district, Summerhill, to his mother who died of an overdose when he was 12, to the countless homes where he packed and unpacked his suitcases before settling with his grandmother, the film somehow heals the wounds. « He’s a rather unstable and extreme character, undoubtedly flawed as a father in places, but who is saved by his tenderness, and whom his love prevents from behaving immorally. »
Since his revelation in 2017 with Nolan’s Dunkirk, the actor has still only timidly yielded to Hollywood, apart from an almost unnoticed stint with Marvel (The Eternals). It was in the British Isles, where he no longer lives, that he continued to make his way to supporting roles (The Banshees of Inisherin) and then leading roles (Saltburn). “The first thing that attracts me to a film is its familiarity. Instinctively I’m more interested in telling stories that bear witness to something I’ve experienced or seen, even if you can understand it in a broad sense, why not in science fiction.” Or in storytelling, as in Bird, where the Ken Loach-esque anchoring is overlaid with a dreamlike, animal dimension, with his character, Bug, taking on the symbolism of the insect, while Franz Rogowski’s character takes on that of the bird – that which crawls and crawls versus that which flies and frees itself.
And then there’s the music, that « sincere dad music » drawn from the Brit rock repertoire of the 1990s: the film shows, beyond its quality as a generational emblem, the social role played by these songs, which can seem even more beautiful and reach their ultimate finality when sung not by their performers but by ten drunken Englishmen hugging each other. It was Keoghan himself who chose the two most important songs in the film: Lucky Man by The Verve and, above all, The Universal by Blur, which he sings several times, including one solo for his bride. “It’s my favorite song, and I’m very touched that Andrea allowed me to put it in the film and give it such an important role.”
When asked what he enjoys most about acting, he answers without hesitation: « Listening. In all improv classes, actors tend to fill the air, to gesticulate. Doing nothing, listening, looking your acting partner in the eye is a much more difficult and exciting thing. » A convincing response, though not one that’s entirely easy to reconcile with the actor’s obvious taste for scores saturated with all-out expressivity (The Banshees). But he has nothing to be ashamed of: it’s no coincidence that he’s just landed the new incarnation of the role that every ham in the world dreams of, the Joker in the next Batman movie. « I’m not allowed to tell you any more than that, I’m just very excited… » We can tell him this: it’s the only role – along with that of Vito Corleone – to have already won the Oscar for two different actors.
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