Barry Keoghan is constantly evolving

Barry Keoghan has not long finished his cover shoot for HUNGER. Fresh from his day-long studio session with Rankin, which sees him clad in Stone Island, he admits to feeling somewhat emotional. “I won’t go into how I got this scar, but I’ve got a scar that’s like a millimetre away from my main vein on my left arm. I waited to do this with [Rankin] to show that. You know, it just felt right,” he says in his thick Irish accent while discussing his cover image. “On one wrist you’ve got my mom’s name and then on the other wrist you’ve got this constant reminder, this scar. [Rankin and I] both looked at each other and went, ‘Wow! That’s it.’”

The release of this particular cover story comes at the end of a pivotal year in the actor’s life. It’s been nearly 12 months since the release of Saltburn, the viral psychological thriller from Emerald Fennell in which Keoghan plays a mysterious Oxford University student with a penchant for murder and Sophie Ellis-Bextor. The film undoubtedly transported the 32-year-old actor into mainstream consciousness, and this year, his much-discussed relationship with the rising pop star Sabrina Carpenter has only pushed him further into popular culture. “It has been a crazy year. Focus has shifted from me as an actor to me as a person, which is always dangerous and not nice. That can really affect you, but it can also affect your career. People can [start to] have a judgment on you and they won’t go see stuff,” he says candidly. “It’s just the cliché of judging a book by its cover. It’s why I wanted to put this image on the cover. People don’t know what you’ve lived, what scars you have or how you’ve grown up.”

The extent of the increasing public interest was evidenced when he recently came under scrutiny for his misconstrued quotes about parenting. When trying to explain that, having had no blueprint for parenting with his own parents not being present he’s forging his own way as a dad, journalists and social media users jumped on his quotes and turned them into a slew of clickbait articles and X (formerly Twitter) threads. “By God, didn’t the feckin’ internet do their work! ‘Deadbeat father’, blah, blah, blah! It’s just because I don’t post my child 24/7 or give the internet what they want. My son isn’t a talking point. It’s not my place to be sticking up pictures of his face all over the internet — not in this day and age with the internet and how sick it can be,” he says passionately. It’s clear that this particular experience has rattled him, and understandably so. “People are so feckin’ quick to judge. It can really affect you, but I’m a strong person. I do some therapy. I’m a work in progress. I’m constantly evolving as an actor, as a father, as a human. I’m always trying to grow.”