Barry Keoghan's experience with a flesh eating disease and the foster care system

Barry Keoghan has been acting for thirteen years, but he seemed to have overnight success with his Oscar-nominated turn in The Banshees of Inersherin and then set tongues wagging and launched a thousand memes with his recent turn in Saltburn opposite Jacob Elordi.

Now, for the February 2024 cover story for GQ, the Irish hunk talks about how he manifested his entire career by writing down his goals, his humble beginnings in the Irish foster care system, being a new father, and meeting his Hollywood heroes.

In the GQ cover story, there are a lot of moments in Barry’s life that might have derailed his dreams of being a Hollywood leading man. His mother, he says, was addicted to heroin, and died when he was 12. His father was already gone by that point, so Barry and his brother bounced around the Dublin foster care system for years until he was finally returned to his family to live with his grandmother and aunt.

Dreams of Hollywood might seem so distant and unattainable in moments like that, but as he tells GQ, he hunkered down and watched tons of classic old Hollywood movies until the early morning eating Rice Krispies.

In fact, when he became a father 15 months ago, he named his son after one of his old Hollywood heroes - Brando.

“Imagine that, for a name! I set him up,” he tells the outlet. “Brando Keoghan, piano player! I obviously love Marlon Brando, but I just, yeah—for a first name I thought it was quite cool. To have Brando in your name— feckin’ hell, man! He’s got a lot to live up to, that kid.” 

“But he’ll live up to it. He has to have that leather jacket and that rock-star attitude, you know what I mean? He’ll have a motorbike when he’s 12, I think.”

Brando was born during the filming of Saltburn, where Barry stars opposite Jacob Elordi in the button-pushing, provocative thriller that he admits in some weird way is almost a coming-of-age story, were it not for all the death. However, the chemistry between Barry and Jacob in the film, and most notably, on the red carpet, sizzles. It has set the internet aflame, and Barry admits he doesn’t mind stoking those flames.

“I’m really flirtin’, ” he says of his relationship with the Euphoria star.  “We were constantly close. It ain’t just for the cameras and the premiere[s]. Me and Jacob—he’s like a brother to me, honestly. I think when you’re comfortable with someone, you can be as close as you want, you know what I mean? It’s not like, ‘Oh, don’t come near me’—it’s like, I’m comfortable. When I’m comfortable around people, I’m comfy.”

He continues, “I’m comfortable with Jacob. Messin’ about. Havin’ a laugh. We’re bein’ lads. We’ve just done a movie where we had to kiss, man. Look at the scenes we’ve done. You have to be comfortable with yourself.”

It would seem that Hollywood is not only his dream, it’s also fully embraced him. In the cover story, we learn that even before he hit the big time, huge names like Daniel Day-Lewis were gushing about Barry’s talent, and Barry even got the chance to meet his hero Leonardo DiCaprio, whose Basketball Diaries really inspired the young actor.

Even frequent collaborator and fellow Irishman Colin Farrell gushed to the outlet, “Give me truth over craft any day, and that’s what Barry brings. Truth. It’s innate. He lays it all out there in an instinctual way and it just gets deeper and deeper.”

Barry’s turn opposite Colin in The Banshees of Inersherin almost didn’t happen. In fact, Barry reveals four days before shooting was to commence, Barry faced possible amputation and even death when he contracted a flesh eating disease in his arm. A scar on his arm is the only evidence of the near-death experience now, but at the time, it threw everything into flux. He even asked the doctors if he would live and they responded without certainty. 

Banshees director Martin McDonagh, who visited Barry in the hospital,  told the outlet, “I went to the hospital thinking, Shit—is he going to die? Let alone, is he going to make the movie.”

He did make the movie, and ended up with an Oscar nom, something that McDonagh predicted. Barry seems to have predicted his entire career by manifesting - writing down a list of his goal, and ticking them off one by one. He admits that working with directors Martin McDonagh and Chloé Zhao and Emerald Fennell were all on his list, all of whom he now has.

Even being on the cover of GQ was part of the plan. “It’s a big moment for me—it’s GQ. It’s a massive moment,” he tells the outlet “I wrote this down in my to-do list—to be onna cover of GQ. I’m not even sh***in’ you. I wrote that down.”

You can read the entire GQ profile here.