Calm with Horses star Barry Keoghan on having ADHD, growing up in care, and playing a Marvel villain

By now, people are used to seeing Barry Keoghan’s dark side – in Irish drama series Love/Hate, playing a psychotic cat killer; in Killing of a Sacred Deer, playing a disturbing, paranormal teenager; and most recently, in Irish crime drama Calm with Horses, playing a violent, manipulative hoodlum.

The roles the Dublin-born actor chooses are influenced by his difficult upbringing. Alongside his brother, he spent much of his childhood in foster care, switching between 13 different foster homes. His mother died from a heroin overdose when he was just 12 years old; afterwards, he was raised by his aunt and grandmother.

“Like every actor, I want to express my pain,” he says, surprisingly nonchalantly. “So I think these shady characters help. I want to hide behind a mask, and these have more of a mask than your 2D characters, your happy-go-lucky characters. I want to play someone with a bit more of an edge; someone who challenges people, and that doesn’t have it all easy.”

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Tapping into that darkness, Keoghan is arguably the standout performer in new film Calm with Horses, which includes other strong turns from Cosmo Jarvis and The Virtues’ Niamh Algar. The film focuses on Douglas “Arm” Armstrong (Jarvis), an ex-boxer and father who works as a reluctant enforcer for the Devers, a dangerous family of drug dealers. As Dympna, Arm’s best friend and perennial bad influence, Keoghan is a force of swaggering desperation. He is, according to the actor, “a boy living in the shadow of his family”.​

Calm with Horses is part of a flourishing film movement in Ireland, reckons Keoghan, who now resides in Los Angeles. “I think the Irish directors are always elevating,” he says. “We’re the land of storytelling and we shoot a lot of great things in Ireland, even Game of Thrones. It’s a gorgeous and – pardon the cliche – a mythical land.”

“I think we’re becoming a strong force,” he continues, citing Cathy Brady and Lee Cronin as directors to watch, along with Martin McDonagh, the playwright whose success with Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri made him one of the few Irish filmmakers to truly crack the US market.

Having made films both sides of the Atlantic, does he prefer speaking in his native accent? “I do. It’s kinda nice,” he responds, then seems to change his mind. “But the struggle with that is, am I playing me? It’s nice to hide behind some sort of shield.” Keoghan talks about shields and masks a lot.

He seems restless, sat perched on an armchair in the lobby of a Soho hotel, but happy to talk. One of the first things that strikes you about Keoghan is how young he still looks. It’s probably fitting, then, that he is set to star in a film about Henry McCarty, better known as Billy the Kid, the Wild West gunslinger who murdered eight men before being shot dead at the age of 21.

The recently greenlit biopic will be directed by American Animals’ Bart Layton, and produced by The Favourite’s Ed Guiney. Keoghan’s eyes light up when he talks about the project, which he has been trying to get off the ground for three years. “We want to humanise Billy,” he says. “Because he had to live up to this mythical character. While he was alive, he became this legend, and I guess he had to act that way.

“So I want to tell his story. I feel like I relate to him in a lot of ways,” he says. You can see in his face that he means it. “He was a survivor. He hopped from home to home as a kid, the equivalent of foster care, as well. It was different times though, obviously. I want to bring his story to the forefront.”

Like Billy, Keoghan is conscious of the power of mythmaking, especially in the meretricious world of Hollywood. He is generous when talking about his collaborators, but occasionally lets slip just how deep his ambitions are.

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At 27, he has already worked with filmmakers such as Christopher Nolan, Yorgos Lanthimos and Chloe Zhao (in Marvel’s The Eternals, out later this year) – but Keoghan has a formidable, and creatively diverse, list of directors he still wants to work with, including Andrea Arnold, Lynne Ramsay and Barry Jenkins. After being bowled over by Portrait of a Lady on Fire director Céline Sciamma’s 2014 film Girlhood, he sent her an Instagram message letting her know he would love her to cast him.

For The Eternals, Keoghan had to bulk up, with the help of Hollywood trainers and nutritionists, in order to credibly play Druig, the movie’s superpowered villain. “I look at myself as a method actor. I do stay in character and I immerse myself in that role,” he says. Speaking about his physical transformation, he says he looked at Christian Bale’s extreme work in Vice and The Machinist as an inspiration. There are, he says, “no limits” to what he would do to visibly and vocally change for a role.

“With The Eternals, you’re a superhero, so you’ve got to look like a superhero,” he says. He’s playing a proper bad guy in that film, though – not a hero? Such binaries aren’t how he sees the world. Talking about his character’s villainy, he says, “I think they’re all superheroes. Villain or good person? To me, they’re all good.”

Keoghan's other ambition is to do theatre on Broadway or the West End – adding, off-handedly, “because all the great actors do stage”. But he has never acted on stage professionally, partly because of the difficulty involved in learning lines. “You know, I’ve got ADD, man,” he says plainly. “You might have noticed from how I move so much.”

“The first thing that an actor should know is his lines, but I do have a hard time concentrating on reading and holding my attention to certain things. I think any filmmaker that works with me knows that, and gets that.”

The difficulties of his condition are made up for by his strong work ethic and passion for cinema; he researches filmmakers before working with them to get an intuitive feel for their “rhythms”. In Killing of a Sacred Deer, you can see just how brilliantly this approach works, as he nails Lanthimos’ idiosyncratic tone. The Greek filmmaker cast him over hundreds of other candidates, saying in an interview with Cine-Vue that Keoghan was the only one “complex enough to convey all different aspects of the character at the same time”.

Keoghan is currently working his way through The Authentic Life of Billy, the Kid, the 1892 book written by Pat Garrett, the Sheriff who killed the notorious outlaw. Largely due to his attention deficit disorder (ADHD), Keoghan has always struggled with books (“I get freaked out if a book has 300 pages”), finding films better at sustaining his attention. He grew up adoring the films of Paul Newman – who himself played the iconic outlaw in the 1958 Arthur Penn film The Left-Handed Gun (although Keoghan’s version aims to “steer clear of the cliche of Western movies”).

“It was more about mannerisms and behaviour with Paul Newman,” he says. “I look at these films, and it wasn’t the acting, really – well, it was, but it was more looking at how to behave.”

When Keoghan is feeling down, he re-watches the classic Newman jailhouse movie Cool Hand Luke. “It’s such an uplifting movie for me, and reminds me of what life is when you’re having a tough time.” Where some see bleakness in the ill-fated story of a prisoner’s defiant escape, Keoghan finds hope.

Keoghan is now six years older than Billy the Kid was when he died. But even with a string of great performances behind him, it feels like he is just getting started. He has already done so much more than survive.

Calm With Horses will be available to watch digitally from 27 April 2020