RENWICK STREET, BEING BLIND, MUST BE ONE OF THE LEAST traveled streets in all New York, a one-block one-way that dead-ends at Canal and doesn’t see much traffic, foot or car. There’s a gym at the blind end, and he’s in there behind the tinted windows, the actor with the pain and hope of a generation in his eyes, gloved up and punching his heart out on a Tuesday afternoon.
Pah! Pah!
Pah-pah-pah!
Pah-pah! Pah!
He’s hitting pads with his guy, Boss Man, bouncing and hooting as he finishes each round of hits. He grins and shouts:
—Hoooo! The Irish is here!
Sweaty and finished, he leaps from the ring, untapes his boxing gloves, and then holds the opening to his nose and inhales. The gloves smell of new leather and sweat.
—That smell is addictive, though, innit! Like the smell of your own shoes.
He is bigger than he looked in some of the movies he’s acted in—Dunkirk and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (both 2017) and The Banshees of Inisherin (2022), the movie in which he broke your heart and got an Academy Award nomination to show for it. In those movies, his strength emerged not in the form of muscles but of his eyes, which are thin almonds and yet emit more spark and glint than the average blue-eyed Irishman’s full-size blue eyes. They are lidded and vaguely DiCaprian, as if always peering or squinting to see things the rest of us don’t.
—There’s something different about the eyes, d’you know what I mean? he says at one point, turning so you can see them.
—See that? Something Eastern European maybe, I d’know.
Everything is different about Barry Keoghan. The way his face contorts ever so slightly to show you mischief or madness or melancholy, or maybe all three at once. The way he can take the piss out of people. The way he can take the piss out of himself. Whatever it is, it has). He’s in a new World War II miniseries produced by Spielberg and Hanks. And in the new film from writer-director Emerald Fennell (), he appears in every frame and gives a performance that will go down in movie history as the one that made Barry Keoghan a star.
