Born in Dublin, Ireland in 1992, Barry Keoghan’s mother died when he was 12 after struggling with a heroin addiction. After this, Keoghan and his brother spent 7 years in foster care, in 13 foster homes before living with his grandmother. He attended drama school in Dublin at Bow Street Academy (formerly The Factory while he was in attendance), with his acting career beginning in 2011. Barry Keoghan has since built up a hefty filmography from 2011 with his roles growing in notoriety from 2017 onwards.
Keoghan’s debut role was in a 2011 short film titled Stand Up in which he played a bully character. He then featured in multiple Mark O’Connor films, Between the Canals, Stalker and King of the Travellers. 2013 gave Keoghan his breakthrough role of Wayne in the TV series Love/Hate, an Irish crime drama based in Dublin. In 2017 Keoghan played Martin Lang in Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou’s psychological horror thriller The Killing of a Sacred Deer. In the same year Keoghan played one of his most well-known roles as George Mills in Dunkirk, in which he acted alongside Harry Styles and Cillian Murphy.
In 2023 Barry Keoghan starred in Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn which is set in 2006, partially at Oxford University and partially at Saltburn where Keoghan’s character Oliver Quick stays for the summer with his best ‘friend’ Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi). Keoghan plays Oliver, a seemingly working-class student struggling to fit in among his upper-class peers when in fact he is middle-class and plotting to take over Saltburn, one Catton family member at a time.
On Louis Theroux’s podcast, Keoghan has spoken about the drug problem in his hometown and how it has affected his family, and he plans to go back and start a youth club for young people who are in similar positions as him and his parents. He spoke about wanting to create a space for creativity with acting classes, boxing lessons and similar creative outlets for the youth in Dublin so that he can help to create opportunities that are lacking in the area.