This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
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?’”
It eventually turned out that there was. Duke Shelby is the violent, disturbed son of Tommy; he’s taken over the Peaky Blinders in his father’s absence and, as events unfold, is arguably the most important character in The Immortal Man.
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.
If the rumours of him playing the lead in the next, Steven Knight-scripted, James Bond film are true, Keoghan will make the most boyish 007 yet. “It’s an iconic role and a lot of weight and pressure comes with that,” he says. “It’s nice to see your name go up there, but I don’t think I fit the criteria for James Bond. I’d rather come in and do the villain. The man teasing Bond, that’s more me.”
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!”
The Immortal Man is, at its core, “the story of family,” Keoghan goes on to explain, “and I see Duke as a lad searching for his father and a lad sticking on a mask, a façade. That’s what resonated with me: I could dig deep and bring forward from my own experiences.”
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.
Absence is a recurring motif in his life. Keoghan himself attracted public criticism for allegedly not seeing enough of Brando, his now three-year-old son with ex-girlfriend Alyson Sandro, when he reduced the number of family pictures he put on social media. This riled him enough to complain to Louis Theroux in a podcast interview in 2024, that “People love to use my son as ammunition” – words that are, ironically, particularly apt for Tommy and Duke Shelby. “I was really moved by the journey alongside Cillian, the dynamics of us playing a father with his son,” he says of the film. “And being a father, I could definitely relate to Cillian’s side of it as well. I think there’s a lot of young men out there who will.”
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.”
Was he nervous, entering that closed, Peaky Blinders world, being among people who had been together for so long? “Obviously. And it was nerve-racking doing the screen test and seeing Cillian transform into his character. I remember looking at him and saying, ‘My God, Tommy Shelby! That’s incredible.’ And Cillian said back at me, ‘Oh man, you look great.’ It warmed my heart when I saw him so moved and touched by how I looked. He was genuinely chuffed because this is his everything, this is his baby, this is going to live with him for ever.”
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.”
In The Beatles, Mescal is Paul McCartney and Keoghan Ringo Starr. “I’m playing a legend and it’s absolutely wonderful,” Keoghan says. “I think the most challenging part is it being a real person rather than a character. There are so many more layers to someone that’s real. It’s a bit of a scary thing, you’re exposing a little bit of yourself. But this is going to be a massive part of my life. I’m very, very grateful for it.”
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.”
Before Keoghan goes, he says: “It’s crazy when you think of it. The irony in Cillian asking me to be in Peaky Blinders from a Father’s Day text. He and I were joking earlier, I said, ‘Imagine I’d texted and you went, ‘Who’s this?’ But I’m glad I got to be part of that last moment with Cillian and it happened how it did. Glad that I waited and it came around in such a magical way.”
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