Barry Keoghan has waited a long time to be a Peaky Blinder. “I had that haircut for at least seven years, just in my normal life,” the actor explains. “I’m a massive fan, I was always asking Shaheen Baig, who casts the show, ‘Is there anything there I can do?’”
The result of a dalliance with a young Romany woman called Zelda before Tommy went to the Western Front, Duke is 25 when we meet him on the eve of the Second World War. Keoghan is older at 33, but with those cheekbones and his pale blue eyes, he looks young enough to play it – as he did in a Bafta-winning turn as manchild Dominic Kearney in The Banshees of Inisherin in 2022 and the murderous undergraduate Oliver Quick in 2023’s Saltburn.
Since becoming an international star following Saltburn, Keoghan was welcomed into a protective huddle with other Irish actors, which is how, in the end, he finally got the Peaky Blinders role. “I stay in touch with my Irish peers – Cillian, Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, we’re quite tight and supportive of one another,” he says. “So, I sent a message to Cillian on Father’s Day and said, ‘Happy Father’s Day.’ Cillian replied, ‘Happy Father’s Day back at you, would you like to play my son Duke?’” Keoghan got the part on the back of a Father’s Day greeting? “Honestly. Though I do send Happy Mother’s Day messages off to people that I’m close to as well!”
Keoghan was born in the deprived Summerhill area of Dublin where his mother Debbie struggled with heroin addiction and died of an overdose when he was 12. With an absent father, he and brother Eric were in and out of foster homes and then looked after by their grandmother.
Torn by grievance, Duke runs the Peaky Blinders with a reckless violence that is both an expression of his rage and an attempt to gain Tommy’s approval, just as his father is offered a final stab at redemption for his many moral aberrations. The film pivots on one question: will Duke help or hinder Tommy? “It was a very emotional ending before the cameras even rolled, to be honest,” he says. “I was very grateful to be among the cast and crew that have worked on the show, to be accepted into that.”
He is, it’s fair to say, enamoured of his fellow countryman. “I love Cillian. He’s incredible and the pinnacle and the peak of what we Irish actors want to become.” Keoghan, who is now filming Sam Mendes’s four-film Beatles project alongside Dublin-born Paul Mescal, has a theory about the popularity of Irish actors outside Ireland. “The Irish are loved everywhere,” he says. “They’ve put a massive stamp on the world, the mythology and history, the charm of it, and I lean into that. But my Irish charm doesn’t work in Ireland! They’re like, ‘Oh, whatever!’ And they tell me that my accent has changed.”
He talks about acting, I suggest, as if it has saved him, which is understandable, given his childhood. “I think so. I think that’s why I don’t always see it as work. Art is healing, it really does heal the soul. Though I still can’t tell you why I love to do this. It’s a feeling I can’t articulate, like love – I think love is the lazy way of saying that feeling as well. So, I don’t think I’ll ever articulate it, but it’s such a release, such an escape.”
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