The Thing About Barry

At Toronto International Film Festival, Barry Keoghan is a meme king who’s extremely good at his actual job (acting). Photo: MUBI

For an actor most people didn’t know existed two years ago — and now that they do, are still trying to figure out how to pronounce his name — Barry Keoghan has become an incredibly seen young performer. After an Oscar nomination for 2022’s The Banshees of Inisherin; the hurricane of memes, snark, and discourse around last year’s Saltburn; and a publicity-friendly relationship with pop girlie du jour Sabrina Carpenter, Keoghan went from “Oh, that kid in Dunkirk?” to one of 2024’s rodent boyfriends. This come-up is funny if you’re one of the few people who have been following Keoghan’s career since he played the creepy kid who probably poisons Colin Farrell’s family in Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2017 movie The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Keoghan won fans among the cinephile set for the aloof intensity he demonstrates there, which could be dialed up for a movie like The Green Knight or down to suit the snappy superhero needs of Eternals.

Three years after his Marvel debut, Keoghan showed up at Toronto International Film Festival with not one but two movies. Bird, his new film with director Andrea Arnold, premiered at Cannes in May to good reviews but was overshadowed by grabbier films like Anora and Emilia Pérez and ultimately ignored when it came time for the festival to hand out its awards. TIFF scooped up Bird as a Canadian premiere — as it often does with Cannes titles — along with the world premiere of the Irish film Bring Them Down, starring Keoghan and Christopher Abbott as men on two sides of a bitter family rivalry on adjoining farms.

What’s great about seeing Bird and Bring Them Down in close proximity at a film festival is that it provides the full range of the Barry Keoghan screen experience: He’s a fan-cam darling who hits the pages of People magazine “reuniting” with his Saltburn co-star, Jacob Elordi, for a red-carpet photo op, but he’s also a frighteningly talented young actor who can match the artistry of an Arnold movie and hold his own opposite a forceful actor like Abbott. Bring Them Down Barry cracks a hard-boiled egg on his forehead in a scene that will no doubt make it into my reaction-GIF repertoire. But Bird is where Online Barry truly gets to flourish. Playing a tatted-up dad in — even for an Arnold movie — a depressingly impoverished concrete English tenement, Keoghan’s Bug arrives onscreen shirtless, on a motor scooter, sporting a gold chain and newsboy cap, and inked with all sorts of insects, including a centipede winding up his neck and onto his face.

The film centers Bug’s daughter, Bailey (Nykiya Adams), upon whom Bug springs his surprise marriage to a woman Bailey has never met (but who really would love for Bailey to wear this animal-print bodysuit she just bought). And there’s a whole other half of the movie having to do with Franz Rogowski. But I won’t spoil any of that. I will, however, give you a sampling of the things Barry gets up to in Bird:

➼ He acquires a hallucinogenic toad, which he plans to use for drug-dealing purposes (sorry, “porpoises”) to finance his wedding.

➼ He practices for his wedding dance when he thinks no one is watching.

➼ He asks Bailey, “Why can’t you be chuffed for me?,” when she’s clearly upset about her surprise stepmom.

➼ He plays “dad music” because he thinks it will help his hallucinogenic toad secrete more of the good stuff.

➼ He calls “Murder on the Dancefloor” a “shit song.”

➼ He leads a karaoke sing-along rendition of Coldplay’s “Yellow” while holding his hallucinogenic toad.

➼ He jumps a turnstile while wearing a green nylon track suit.

➼ He asks “Where’s Scotland?” while looking at a map of Britain.

➼ He sings the Verve’s “Lucky Man” while riding on a scooter with his daughter and son (yes, he also has a son).

➼ He says, “Fuck Scotland … fuck haggis.”

➼ He wears a cerulean tux with mauve lining and no shirt to his wedding, where he dances to “Cotton Eye Joe” and sings Blur’s “The Universal.”

Here’s the thing about Barry in meme-king mode: He delivers. He gives Arnold’s film the perfect mix of hopelessly ill-equipped dead-end dad who nonetheless revels in his trashy aesthetics, loves his kids, and cherishes his new wife. Whenever the camera seeks him out, he projects the exact right lovely-scum-bum energy the movie needs.

But if Bird is where Barry gets to cut loose, Bring Them Down is where Barry has to bottle it all up, playing a son burdened with the loyalties and hatreds his parents have passed down. For so much of the movie, Keoghan’s Jack is a passive participant in the plot; when his father (Paul Ready, excellent) and mother (Nora-Jane Noone, also excellent) argue about their failing sheep farm, Jack lurks helplessly, and when his dad decides to take provocative and violent action against Abbott’s neighboring farm, Jack just suits up. The latter parts of director Christopher Andrews’s movie are mostly about Jack finally deciding whether he’ll carry on his parents’ enmity, and Keoghan’s ability to retreat into the skin of an unsure kid is impressive here. When the movie lands on him and Abbott face-to-face, it’s simply electric.

This is what gets lost in all the fun we have with his red-carpet expressions, his high-school-senior-who-just-got-hot fashion sense, and his accent: the fact that he grabbed our attention by being incredibly good at his actual job. “Well, there goes that dream” isn’t a funny line on its own; it resonates because of Keoghan’s ability to play disarming vulnerability. Saltburn, for all its provocations and eyebrow piercings, grabbed attention not because of the plain existence of a cum-slurpy bathtub scene but because Keoghan delivered the creepy possessive longing necessary to sell it. Some performers are fine teetering along the high wire that separates acting from celebrity without falling on one side or the other lest they lose the critics or the stans. For the moment, Barry Keoghan is staying upright, riding his scooter, and getting high off the hallucinogenic toad that is popularity in the 2020s.