Barry Keoghan, from thirteen foster homes to playing Ringo Starr

Barry Keoghan

Photo: Senior Airman Austin Pate / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 18, 1992 Dublin, Ireland
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Dunkirk, The Batman, Eternals
Awards	BAFTA · IFTA · London Film Critics' Circle · Hasty Pudding Man of the Year

There is a scene Barry Keoghan keeps getting hired to play. A young man smiles a little too long, stays in the room a little after everyone else has gone, and the audience starts checking the exits. He has done it at a family dinner table for Yorgos Lanthimos, in a bathtub and on a grave for Emerald Fennell, and behind the bars of Arkham for Matt Reeves. The unease is his signature, and the industry has paid well for it.

This autumn he brought something else to the Toronto International Film Festival. In Lemonade, a small Dublin drama about a boy counting down the days until he ages out of foster care, Keoghan plays a supporting part and signs as executive producer through his own company, Wolfcub. He made it in a gap between shoots as Ringo Starr for Sam Mendes, and he has been unusually open about why it mattered: he grew up inside that system. “There are moments in Lemonade when I was like, ‘this is too to-the-bone,'” he said of the film. “Honestly, it makes me emotional just chatting about it, but it’s beautiful.”

That distance, between the menace audiences buy a ticket for and the boy who learned to read a room because his safety depended on it, is the most useful way into one of the strangest careers in English-language film today.

Summerhill, thirteen homes and a shop-window casting call

Keoghan was born on 18 October 1992 and grew up in Summerhill, in Dublin’s north inner city. His mother was addicted to heroin and died when he was twelve. By then he and his brother, Eric, had spent seven years in foster care, passing through thirteen different homes, before their grandmother, their aunt and an older cousin, Gemma, took them in. Some records still list his birthday as the 17th; he has corrected that himself on social media.

School did not hold him. At O’Connell School on North Richmond Street he was banned from the school plays for messing about. His real film education happened in the dark at the Cineworld on Parnell Street, where he and his friends sneaked into screenings until the cinema barred him. The break came from a sheet of paper in a shop window on Sheriff Street: a casting notice for Between the Canals, a low-budget crime film by Mark O’Connor. He answered it, got the part, and then enrolled at The Factory, a Dublin drama school now called Bow Street, at a time when, he has said, he did not always have the €2.20 for the bus to get there.

The Irish apprenticeship

For the next five years he took whatever Irish film and television offered. There was a second film with O’Connor, Stalker, a spell on the RTÉ soap Fair City, and then the part that made strangers stop him in Dublin: Wayne, a teenage recruit in the gangland drama Love/Hate. British cinema noticed next. He had a role in Yann Demange’s Belfast thriller ’71, then turned up in Mammal and in Trespass Against Us, alongside Michael Fassbender and Brendan Gleeson.

Two directors, one year

The international turn came in 2017, and it came twice. In Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk he was George, the teenager who climbs aboard Mr Dawson’s small boat to help with the evacuation and does not come home. The part is small and nearly wordless, and it put his face in front of a global audience. A few months later Yorgos Lanthimos made that same face frightening. In The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Keoghan played Martin, the polite, flat-voiced teenager who attaches himself to a surgeon played by Colin Farrell and calmly explains that the man’s family is going to start dying. The performance won him the Irish Film and Television Award for best supporting actor, and a reputation he has never fully shaken.

He spent the next few years testing how far that reputation could stretch. He was one of four students planning a real rare-book theft from a university library in Bart Layton’s American Animals, an English soldier stationed in famine-era Ireland in Black ’47, the young conscript Pavel sent to shoot contaminated animals in HBO’s Chernobyl, and Dympna, the heir of a small-town crime family, in Calm with Horses, which premiered at Toronto in 2019. That year he was also nominated for BAFTA’s Rising Star award. In early 2020 he left the lead role of Yorick in Y: The Last Man before the series reached the screen.

Marvel arrived in 2021 with Druig, the mind-controlling immortal of Chloé Zhao’s Eternals, the same year he played a roadside scavenger in David Lowery’s The Green Knight. Then Matt Reeves gave him a few minutes at the end of The Batman, credited only as “Unseen Arkham Prisoner”. It was the Joker, and three weeks after the film opened Warner Bros. released a deleted scene of his Joker face to face with Robert Pattinson’s Batman.

Inisherin and Saltburn

The two films that turned him from a character actor into a leading man pulled in opposite directions. In Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin he played Dominic Kearney, the lonely, mocked son of the island’s abusive policeman, treated by everyone as the village fool until he says some of the truest lines in the film. The role won him the BAFTA for best supporting actor in 2023, the London Film Critics’ Circle award in the same category and his first Academy Award nomination.

Emerald Fennell then gave him the lead in Saltburn, as Oliver Quick, a scholarship student at Oxford who works his way into an aristocratic friend’s family and onto their country estate. In cinemas it was a modest earner, but on Amazon Prime Video it became one of the most-streamed films of that winter, and its most outrageous scenes, the bathwater, the grave, the naked dance through the house to “Murder on the Dancefloor”, were the most shared images of the season. Keoghan was nominated for the Golden Globe and the BAFTA for best actor.

The cost of being watched

Saltburn also exposed the downside of the image. Fennell built the film on the idea that nobody can stop looking at Oliver, and the campaign leaned hard on Keoghan’s body and his reputation for strangeness. The attention followed him home. His son, Brando, was born in 2022 from his relationship with Alyson Kierans, which ended the following year. His next relationship, with the American singer Sabrina Carpenter, and his appearance in her video for “Please Please Please”, pulled him into the machinery of pop fandom. After they split in 2024, he said he had received threats aimed at himself, at his grandmother and at his two-year-old son. In a March 2026 interview with SiriusXM he said he now stays off online platforms and away from the public as much as he can, because of the abuse about his looks, and that what bothers him most is that his son may read it one day.

There is a professional risk too. Reviewing Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, Variety found his “unsettling skew-whiff presence” almost too predictably perfect for the part. Typecasting follows actors who are this good at one register, and his record off screen, including an arrest for public intoxication in Dublin in April 2022 that ended without charge, has been used to blur the line between the man and the roles. The most interesting choices of his recent career read like attempts to break the pattern. He dropped out of a villain role in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II, citing scheduling, and took Andrea Arnold’s Bird instead, playing Bug, a tattooed young father in Kent who tries, loudly and badly, to do right by his twelve-year-old daughter. He followed it with Bring Them Down, a feud between two sheep-farming families in rural Ireland, in which he plays the son whose theft of two rams sets off the violence.

Barry Keoghan and Nykiya Adams at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival — Barry Keoghan with his *Bird* co-star Nykiya Adams at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. Photo: Sara Komatsu / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (source)

A crowded 2026

This has been his busiest year. In February he reunited with Bart Layton for Crime 101, a Los Angeles heist thriller adapted from Don Winslow, playing Ormon, a violent young biker, opposite Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo and Halle Berry. The reviews were good; the box office was not, with about $72 million worldwide against a budget of around $90 million.

In March he took on the Shelby name. Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, Steven Knight’s feature-length continuation of the series, directed by Tom Harper, cast him as Duke, Tommy Shelby’s estranged son, who now runs the gang and has struck a deal with Nazi agents to flood wartime Britain with counterfeit money. Knight said that once he saw the first rushes of Keoghan and Cillian Murphy on either side of a bar, it “couldn’t have been anybody else”. The film opened in selected cinemas on 6 March and arrived on Netflix worldwide on 20 March.

In May, Butterfly Jam opened the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes. It is the English-language debut of the Russian director Kantemir Balagov, the maker of Beanpole, and follows a Circassian teenager in New Jersey torn between the wrestling mat and his family’s struggling diner. Keoghan plays Azik, alongside Riley Keough and Harry Melling; the reviews were mixed. Then, on 12 September, came Lemonade in Toronto’s Centrepiece section: the first fiction feature by the documentary filmmaker Kim Bartley, with Lewis Brophy as Danny, the teenager leaving care, and Keoghan as Josh.

Becoming Ringo

The project that will shape the next two years is the largest he has taken on. Sam Mendes is making four separate films about the Beatles, each told from one member’s point of view, all due in cinemas on the same day, 7 April 2028. Harris Dickinson is John Lennon, Paul Mescal is Paul McCartney, Joseph Quinn is George Harrison, and Keoghan is Ringo Starr. He has described visiting the drummer at home, where Starr played for him and then invited him to take a turn. Keoghan refused. “I wasn’t playing the drums for Ringo,” he told Jimmy Kimmel. He has said he wants “to humanize and bring feelings to it and not just sort of imitate.”

Away from the set

He boxes as an amateur and supports Manchester United, appearing in the club’s 2024–25 kit campaign with his second cousin, the former United striker Frank Stapleton. In 2020 he said he has ADHD and takes medication for it. Since 2022 he has been an ambassador for Barretstown, the Irish charity that runs camps for children with serious illnesses. Fashion houses have courted him since Dior early in his career, and Burberry named him a brand ambassador in 2024, the same year Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Theatricals made him its Man of the Year.

What links the Joker, Dominic Kearney and Oliver Quick is an outsider who watches the room more closely than anyone in it. Keoghan learned that skill long before a casting director saw it on camera. Lemonade is the first time he has put it openly in the service of his own story. Ringo, the Beatle the world spent decades underestimating, will test something else: whether audiences can watch Barry Keoghan and finally relax.