As a rule, Barry Keoghan tries to not decide his characters—even once they’re at their most conniving and homicidal, like Saltburn’s Oliver Quick. He may even justify all that homicide on the dance ground, telling Vanity Fair of costar Jacob Elordi: “I mean, how could you not be obsessed with that man?”
The 32-year-old Irish actor lately sat for VF’s Scene Selection video sequence, the place he delved into the foremost moments of his burgeoning profession. That consists of Keoghan’s Oscar-nominated supporting efficiency in The Banshees of Inisherin. “It came at the right time. I needed something to kind of show range,” he remembers, “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 movie comes when his sad-sack character Dominic tries—and fails—to romance a fellow islander, Siobhán (performed by Kerry Condon). After she rejects him, he sighs, “Well, there goes that dream.”
Keoghan had one thing of a breakout 12 months 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 movie, by which Keoghan’s teenaged character Martin wreaks havoc on a household led by Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman, he merely 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 spotlight? Going head-to-head along with his real-life pal Robert Pattinson in The Batman. “He’s a fecking great actor, isn’t he?” says Keoghan, who provides that though he studied hyenas to excellent the vocal stylings of his function as “Unseen Arkham Prisoner”—a personality closely rumored to be the long run Joker—that distinct cackle is all his personal. “I remember keeping my real laugh, which is kind of scary.”
Watch the entire video above to listen to extra tales from Keoghan, who subsequent stars as a single father in Andrea Arnold’s coming-of-age movie Bird, out on November 8.