Amateur boxer who overcame the death of his heroin-addict mother and 13 foster homes to become a Hollywood knockout
As Barry Keoghan, star of Masters Of The Air and Saltburn, vies for a Bafta on Sunday . . .
SummerHill, a gritty neighbourhood on the north side of Dublin, is not somewhere you’d want to find yourself after dark. one of the most deprived areas of the irish capital, it’s a den of drugs, delinquency and gang violence.
residents are used to the sirens of passing Garda vans piercing their sleep.
in 2015, a father-of-five was shot seven times during a family raffle night at a local pub, by gun-wielding strangers wearing Freddy Krueger masks.
in 2022, a gang of 50 youths surrounded and attacked a Deliveroo cyclist. Such incidents have become so rife that some delivery drivers refuse to take orders from the area.
it is here, in a two-bedroom council flat on a graffiti-ridden estate off Summerhill parade, that lorraine Keoghan, 59, raised three young children, taking a job as a cleaner in a pub to pay the bills.
one of these children was Barry, her sister Debbie’s son.
Barry was eight when lorraine — who also lived with her mother, Barry’s grandmother, patricia, now 91 — adopted him, by which time he and his elder brother, eric, had already been shunted between 13 different foster homes.
His father, now dead, wasn’t around and his mother was a heroin addict. Her addiction made her incapable of looking after her young children — or herself.
The apple of his mother’s eye, Barry used to visit Debbie in hospital every day after school, dancing like elvis and doing impersonations to make her laugh.
She was, Barry says, ‘gorgeous’: 6ft tall with long, black hair and the same hauntingly beautiful eyes as her younger son.
Four years after he had moved in with his aunt, however, Debbie died from several drug-related illnesses, including pneumonia, septicaemia and hepatitis. She was just 31; Barry was 12.
Two decades later, and now the same age his mum was when she died, things look very different for that young boy who had such a tragic start in life.
Strutting down the red carpet at the Golden Globes last month in head-to-toe louis vuitton worth more than £6,000, Barry Keoghan looked every inch the star.
The rough edges of his youth have been polished to a Hollywood shine: today he wears designer labels, flies first-class — and is said to have earned as much as
£ 13.4 million from acting, with critically acclaimed roles in Dunkirk and The Banshees of inisherin.
HIS headline-grabbing part in salacious thriller Saltburn has already earned him both a Golden Globe and a Bafta nomination — and he has just hit the screens again in masters of The Air, a nine-part series for Apple Tv, following the exploits of a group of World War ii pilots and produced by Hollywood royalty Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks.
Barry’s love life now makes headline news — he’s said to be dating u.S. starlet Sabrina Carpenter, 24, with the pair attending their first public event together at a starstudded Grammys after-party last week — and his instagram followers have soared to 2 million.
For locals back in Summerhill, meanwhile, life hasn’t changed much in 20 years.
Gillian Collins, a youth worker and Barry’s one- time mentor, remembers meeting a wide-eyed youngster with plenty of swagger when he was just 14. ‘ He was friendly, he was funny, he was a little bit hyper,’ says Gillian, 46, speaking exclusively to the mail.
She is now operations manager at the Belvedere Youth Club, where the actor used to go after school to see friends, play table tennis and do his homework.
‘This place is notorious for all the wrong reasons, but this is something good,’ she says. ‘Barry came from here, and he’s shown the other kids that they can do something big, too, if they follow their dream. His dream was to be a Hollywood actor, and it’s a fairy tale what happened to him.’
Fairy tales can be hard to come by on these inner- city Dublin streets. on a bitterly cold afternoon, a long dole queue can be seen snaking out the door of the post office on Summerhill parade, stretching all the way down the street to the Bridge Tavern.
Barry’s aunt, lorraine, still has a cleaning job here, and the regulars fondly refer to her nephew as ‘Hollywood’. There’s a black-andwhite photograph of him, pulling a pint of Guinness, behind the bar. ‘He hasn’t had anything handed to him on a plate,’ said lorraine. ‘Whatever he’s got is through sheer hard work and determination.
‘As a youngster i wouldn’t say he was wild, but he was hyperactive at times because of his ADHD [Keoghan was diagnosed aged 27, and now takes medication for the condition]. But he was sure of himself — quite a cocky lad but with bags of character.’
Gemma Keoghan, 37, Barry’s cousin who lived with him growing up, remembers Barry and eric yearning for a ‘forever home’, and the brothers spending almost a year in a care facility before their adoption went through.
‘i was always bossing him and going: “Have you tidied that room? You have the place manky.” But for the most part, he was very good.’
Acting wasn’t his first love: Barry was into football, riding his dirt bike, and boxing — which remains a passion today.
it was at his youth club, in a 2010 amateur dramatics production of Hairspray, that the 17-year- old first trod the boards. Despite having no acting experience, Barry
‘just blew everyone away’, Gillian Collins remembers.
Teachers at O’Connell Secondary School recall watching him in Christmas plays, having the audience in stitches with his improvised antics.
‘He shone when he was on stage,’ says former teacher Conor Flood, who is now assistant principal.
‘He loved acting from day one. Barry would have had that focus on what it was that he wanted to do. [He always had an] enormous smile on his face. He has kind of evolved into that same positive adult, no matter how many Christian Dior outfits he has.’
At home, Barry would stay up late watching old films and honing his craft through mimicry. He was banned from the local Cineworld ( where, ironically, the Irish premiere of one of his films was held many years later), for sneaking in without paying.
His cousin, Gemma, remembers hearing him practising accents through his bedroom door, and says he used to keep a notebook of all the directors he wanted to work with. Once he got the acting bug, she says, ‘there was nothing else’.
‘We used to have arguments like: “You have to go and get an education; you have to do your Leaving Cert [Irish equivalent to A-levels].” But he was like: “I know what I want to do.”’
AGED 19 and unemployed, Barry used his grandmother’s mobile to ring a number from an advert in a shop window, calling for ‘non-actors’ to audition for a role. The salary was £100.
Irish director Mark O’Connor, who was casting for his 2011 film Between The Canals, answered Barry’s call and remembers a young man who was ‘incredibly persistent and very curious’.
‘He was just learning the craft; he had no prior experience or training,’ Mark told the Mail. ‘ But I wasn’t looking for that. I was looking for truth and honesty on screen, and behaviour rather than acting.
‘Barry had that potential . . . he developed his process and would research and live in the shoes of his characters.’
He got the part — and so began the long, arduous road to Hollywood stardom.
Barry enrolled at The Factory, a local acting school, and soon found himself cast in bit-parts in Irish soaps and TV crime dramas. It wasn’t much of a living; some days he’d struggle to cobble together the bus fare across town.
In 2017, Barry secured roles in two major films which caught the attention of the acting elite: Christopher Nolan’s war epic Dunkirk, and psychological thriller The Killing Of A Sacred Deer, alongside Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman, in which he played sinister teen Martin.
Critics praised his eerie, psychopathic performance, but loved ones, especially Barry’s grandmother, Pat, were disturbed by it.
‘When she came out of the cinema, he went, “What did you think?”,’ recalls his cousin Gemma. ‘She was like: “I don’t like you now for a while — don’t come near me.” He was so believable in it.’
During filming in Cincinnati, Ohio, Barry trained at Cincinnati Fitness Boxing, whose owner, Jeff Perry, remembers a charismatic, dedicated young man.
‘He was very eager to learn and fun to be around,’ he says. ‘He had good boxing skills and could have been a successful amateur boxer if he had wanted to.’
Last year, Barry won a Bafta for Best Supporting Actor in the Brendan Gleeson film The Banshees Of Inisherin. The same role earned him an Oscar nomination.
In Saltburn, released last November, he finally landed the part he’d been dreaming of all along: that of the leading man. He plays creepy, class-obsessed university student Oliver Quick.
Now that part has secured him the coveted Best Actor Bafta nomination — this Sunday he’ll go head-to-head with fellow Irishman and favourite to win, Oppenheimer’s Cillian Murphy.
Though he lives in London, Barry spends much of his time in Los Angeles, leading a pampered A-list life, where he counts Wonka star Timothee Chalamet and wrestler Dwayne Johnson as friends.
But the troubled, hyped- up youngster who used to mess around on stage at school hasn’t yet fully grown up, it seems. There’s been talk of him turning up late for filming and being ‘very difficult’ on set.
In 2022, Irish media reported that he had been arrested in Dublin for a public order offence, after being found drunk on an apartment balcony. He was cautioned and released without charge.
Then there was the incident last year at a £109-a-night hotel in Dundee, when Barry was apparently asked to leave for ‘misbehaving’ in front of other guests.
His two-year relationship, with Scottish orthodontic therapist Alyson Kierans, 35 — mother of his 17-month-old son, Brando — was said to have been crumbling at the time, amid reports of Barry’s partying. They split nine months later.
They had met in a London pub in 2021, after Barry had split from his previous long- term girlfriend, former waitress Shona Guerin.
Alyson said Barry chatted her up by showing her selfies on his phone with Angelina Jolie, with whom he’d starred in the 2021 Marvel film eternals.
Barry sees Brando when he can, and is said to be on good terms with Alyson, despite recent reports linking him with Sabrina Carpenter.
Speaking from her home in Dundee, Alyson’s mother, Kathy, 74, said the pair are ‘on talking terms’ for the sake of their son.
‘Barry had the decency to give Alyson the heads-up about his new girlfriend and we can’t fault him for that. Alyson is now focusing on herself and her son,’ she says.
even with another blonde bombshell on his arm, Barry has recently opened up about the ‘massive loneliness’ he feels. Irish actor John D’alessandro, says being in the spotlight doesn’t come naturally to his old friend.
‘He’s actually a shy lad, but when you get to know him he opens up,’ he says. ‘ He doesn’t like the publicity part of being famous. He’s private but he loves being an actor. He puts up with the publicity for that.’
Above all, Barry has admitted in recent interviews that he misses his mum.
LOSING her, says his aunt, Lorraine, is a ‘scar’ he will carry all of his life. He wears a silver bracelet engraved with her name and, every year on May 4, the day she died, shares an old picture of her, grinning as she clutches her two young sons, who are wearing matching red striped pyjamas.
He’s still close to his brother, eric, who keeps a low profile, reportedly working backstage on art production in films; and is a proud uncle to eric’s two young daughters.
When Barry does return to Dublin these days, the locals don’t roll out any red carpets for him.
Packie Collins, owner of the Celtic Warrior boxing gym, where Barry trains when he’s in town, says he’s the same ‘down-to-earth’ boy he always was.
‘He’s worked hard for everything he’s got in life,’ he told the Mail. ‘He’s very grounded in that way. He’s very determined, very sure of himself, very committed. It’s impressive . . . there’s something about Barry.’
And that, above all, is certain. There is something about this scrappy young boxer from Summerhill who has found himself the toast of Hollywood.
At the Bridge Tavern, they’re toasting him, too.
‘To you, he’s a film star,’ says one regular, Guinness in hand. ‘To us, he’s just Barry.’