As a rule, Barry Keoghan tries not to judge his characters—even when they’re at their most conniving and homicidal, like Saltburn’s Oliver Quick. He can even justify all that murder on the dance floor, telling Vanity Fair of costar Jacob Elordi: “I mean, how could you not be obsessed with that man?”
The 32-year-old Irish actor recently sat for VF’s Scene Selection video series, where he delved into the major moments of his burgeoning career. That includes Keoghan’s Oscar-nominated supporting performance in The Banshees of Inisherin. “It came at the right time. I needed something to kind of show range,” he recalls, “a character that was a bit more gentle and a bit more naive and a bit more innocent—that has no twisted kind of demeanor or motives.” One of Keoghan’s most “heartbreaking” scenes in that film comes when his sad-sack character Dominic tries—and fails—to romance a fellow islander, Siobhán (played by Kerry Condon). After she rejects him, he sighs, “Well, there goes that dream.”
Keoghan had something of a breakout year in 2017 with the one-two punch of Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, from “genius” filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos. Upon revisiting a scene from the latter film, in which Keoghan’s teenaged character Martin wreaks havoc on a family led by Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman, he simply laughs. “I mean, look at it. It’s like fecking sitting there with spaghetti on my lap in a pair of boxers in front of Nicole Kidman,” says Keoghan. “Yeah, it will stick with me.”
Another highlight? Going head-to-head with his real-life friend Robert Pattinson in The Batman. “He’s a fecking great actor, isn’t he?” says Keoghan, who adds that although he studied hyenas to perfect the vocal stylings of his role as “Unseen Arkham Prisoner”—a character heavily rumored to be the future Joker—that distinct cackle is all his own. “I remember keeping my real laugh, which is kind of scary.”
Watch the whole video above to hear more stories from Keoghan, who next stars as a single father in Andrea Arnold’s coming-of-age film Bird, out on November 8.
