Barry Keoghan knows what it means to have a brush with death and recounted his near-fatal battle with necrotizing fasciitis in an interview for GQ’s February cover story. He recovered from the infection just days before filming Martin McDonagh‘s 2022 feature The Banshees of Inisherin.
Per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, necrotizing fasciitis is a flesh-eating disease caused by a rare bacterial infection, which develops after bacteria enters the body through cuts, scrapes, burns or insect bites. Keoghan stated in his interview that one in five cases is fatal.
Keoghan recalled asking doctors, “But I’m not gonna die, right?” and the medical team telling him, “We don’t know.” For a while, amputation was in consideration.
McDonagh visited Keoghan in the hospital before shooting for Banshees was set to begin, and the filmmaker remembers Keoghan as a picture of calm considering the dire circumstances.
“I’m not sure if he was on a lot of meds, but he seemed to shrug it off,” McDonagh said. “We were only about four days out from shooting, and his arm was puffed up. But he was like, ‘Yeah, no, I’m going to be fine — I’ll see you on Tuesday!’”
Per the profile, Keoghan now boasts “gnarly scar tissue that winds its way up his arm like a snake tattoo” as proof of his survival. He recalled McDonagh telling him in the hospital to “just remember this when you’ve been nominated for an Oscar,” which, in a streak of luck turning his way, is exactly what happened. Keoghan and his co-stars Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson and Kerry Condon were all nominated at the 2023 ceremony.
As he makes clear in the interview, Keoghan is used to marrying his high-stakes personal situations with whatever film set he currently calls home. While shooting Emerald Fennell‘s Saltburn in 2021, his then-girlfriend Alyson Sandro gave birth to their son, Brando.
“It was probably the best time of my life, to be be quite fair,” he said. “Havin’ a baby boy, and leadin’ a movie. It was the best time of my life.”
It was also tightly timed: Keoghan said the Saltburn team only gave him a single day off for Brando’s birth. “They gave me a day off,” he said. “Good on them! Day off, and straight on to night shoots and night feedings — boom!”
These days, as Keoghan rides the impressive high of his movie stardom, the stakes have become more about balancing his time. He dropped out of Ridley Scott‘s Gladiator 2 to film a new project with Andrea Arnold and is in the early stages of working on a project based on his own life.
“It’s crazy when I look of it,” Keoghan said. “Looking out at the [Hollywood] sign and y’know, I wanted this as a kid. I dunno why I wanted it, but I wanted it. It brings back memories, in a weird way — it’s hard to have memories of a place you’ve not been in, but I watched all those old movies, and was fascinated by old Hollywood. This was stuff I dreamt of, as a kid.”
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