Barry Keoghan in talks for Ridley Scott's "Gladiator" sequel

Academy Award nominee and BAFTA winner Barry Keoghan is circling his next high-profile role, with the actor in negotiations to join Ridley Scott’s untitled “Gladiator” sequel. If the deal closes, Keoghan would join fellow 2023 Academy Award nominee Paul Mescal (a best actor nominee for “Aftersun”), who is set to star in the Paramount Pictures film. The sequel follows 2000’s blockbuster hit “Gladiator,” which was nominated for 12 Academy Awards and won five, including best picture. It earned $460 million at the box office, and now Scott is returning to direct and produce the sequel. Paramount has dated the film for November 22, 2024. David Scarpa is penning the script for the sequel, which Scott will also produce with Michael Pruss via Scott Free, as well as Doug Wick and Lucy Fisher via Red Wagon Entertainment. It’s been quite a year for Keoghan, who is fresh off his best supporting actor Oscar nomination and BAFTA win for his heartbreaking turn as Dominic in “The Banshees of Inisherin,” as well as a shocking cameo as the Joker in “The Batman.” The Irish actor is also part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe thanks to his role as Druig in “The Eternals,” but his breakout role came in 2017 with “The Killing of a Sacred Deer.” With “Dunkirk,” “Chernobyl” and “The Green Knight” also among his credits, Keoghan’s career is hotter than ever, as he recently completed production on the Apple TV+ miniseries “Masters of the Air,” as well as Emerald Fennell’s “Saltburn” and the Irish drama “Bring Them Down” (in which Keoghan replaced Paul Mescal). Source: variety.com

Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer was, according to Jessica Kiang at the Playlist. “A film of clean hands, cold heart, and near-Satanic horror, which was garlanded with boos at its Cannes press screening, an absolutely brilliant film.” David Ehrlich declared: “This is Lanthimos’s most scattered and sedate film, but it’s his scariest as well. Influences and shades of Lynch's Blue Velvet to Cronenberg’s early body horror can be found in this suburban nightmare, which alternates between the sterile hallways of Steven’s hospital and the immaculate interiors of the upper-class house that he shares with his wife and their two kids, Kim and Bob.” For the Irish Times’ Donald Clarke, this film’s “nightmarish, Old Testament horrors are unshakable. Lanthimos is not quite a surrealist, but his universe is sufficiently skewed for the main characters to accept the logically outrageous when it arrives. 

Lanthimos’s tone is closer to that of Pinter than Ionesco.” According to Rebecca Elliott from www.aintitcool.com: "The real star of The Killing of a Sacred Deer, however, is Barry Keoghan as the young Martin. Never before has such a subdued portrayal felt so menacing. Though Keoghan keeps it simple with his approach to the disturbing teen, it's the matter-of-fact delivery that truly makes the whole situation extremely unsettling. Just when you think that the kid might just be a bit dull, Keoghan's nuanced performance slowly reveals that the wheels are indeed turning as the chilling plot thickens."

According to The Telegraph review: “It’s also venomously funny. Lanthimos has long been intrigued by the comedic power of the uncanny and its close relationship with dread, and both sensations are in constant flux here. When absurdism feels this wrong, you know it’s being done right.” “When we started writing the script, we discovered there were some parallels with the tragedy Iphigenia in Aulis by Euripides, and I thought it would be interesting to have a dialogue with something that is so ingrained in Western culture, revenge and redemption,” Lanthimos told Fabien Lemercier from Cineuropa. In Greek mythology, Agammemnon accidentally kills a deer sacred to Artemis to which Artemis responds by altering the weather so that Agamemmnon and his fleet cannot sail to Troy. As a penance, Artemis demands that Agammemnon sacrifice his eldest daughter Iphigenia. There are different versions of the story. In an alternative version, before Agamemnon could sacrifice her daughter, Artemis saves her and replaces her with a deer on the altar. The music at the end is the opening of Bach's St. John Passion - which is essentially Christ's death set to music by Bach. Curiously, part of another of Bach's Passions was used in Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice. 

As far as an agent of upheaval, Keoghan makes his character Martin genuinely formidable. Taciturn, insanely manipulative, and a piercing gaze —the actor performs a total reversal of his eager-sailor role in Dunkirk. The whole love angle between Martin and Kim represents how some girls with "dad issues" can act out sexually and look for a replacement for their absentee father in others. The end shows us Kim pouring blood-like ketchup over the fries that Martin said he loved the most. Maybe Kim was so brainwashed and in love with Martin that she agreed to play along the sickness and even helped poison her brother. She always seemed to know about her brother dying and the ending scenes hinted at them being together in the future. Source: criterion.com

Barry Keoghan is a Dublin-born actor and new dad who’s built a quite remarkable career for himself, considering his neglected upbringing. Keoghan says he prays often to his mother, who died of a heroin overdose when he was 12. "I'm pretty sure she's right by my side all the time," he says. Taken in as child by his grandmother, aunt, and cousin, Keoghan gleaned mannerisms from the likes of Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke. "There's a composure about him that he won't break until the end—actually he doesn't, because he leaves with a smile," he says, reminiscing about Newman's defiant prisoner. "It speaks to me in many ways." Keoghan's also hoping to coax Daniel Day-Lewis out of retirement for a Billy the Kid movie he's developing. It seems like a long shot, but he did once meet Day-Lewis, who apparently said he was a "massive fan." It would be an understatement to say the feeling is clearly mutual. Keoghan knows he gets typecast as a sinister presence, but wants more opportunities to show his range, thankful that in Banshees he shows tenderness as Dominic Kearney. 

That said, he'd jump at the opportunity to play the Joker again, following up on his brief cameo in Matt Reeves' The Batman. "I'd love to show a little arc of him," he says. "If I could bring him to life that would be amazing and give you my version, which you've not seen. I want to get there and kind of then show vulnerability, because that's what's real." Martin McDonagh, who wrote the part of Dominic intentionally for the actor, already regards him as “one of the best actors of his generation in the world today, let alone in Ireland”. Director Chloé Zhao, an Oscar winner in 2021 for Nomadland, cast him as Druig, a mind-controlling alien, in her Marvel movie Eternals. She has described him as a “wild wolf”. It is these two fantasy roles that now get Keoghan recognised on the street. But for the quality-boxset-consuming classes, it is more likely to be his role as Pavel, a nuclear contamination “liquidator”, in the acclaimed drama series Chernobyl. 

Christopher Nolan still remembers Keoghan’s audition for Dunkirk: “He had innocence, but with stunning sophisticated truth and maturity.” Nolan calls him “a dazzling talent”. Barry Keoghan was born in 1992, in Summerhill, a drab inner city of Dublin. During his troubled childhood, he spent seven years living in 13 foster care homes before he and his brother Eric were raised by their grandmother. Keoghan talked of a list of directors he’d like to work with. The names he summons at the moment – Andrea Arnold, Lynne Ramsay, Céline Sciamma, Greta Gerwig – are all women. “With a man directing, I can get a bit guarded,” he says. “But with women you allow yourself to be a lot more open and vulnerable, and with being a bit more vulnerable there’s a bit more access to you and to the character.”

Keoghan is halfway through waxing lyrical about his latest project, Fennell’s Saltburn – a film about English aristocracy and an “obsessive” Scouser, played by him in his first lead role – when his partner Alyson Sandro steps into the blaring sunlight of the garden. She's an orthodontist from Scotland who he met in February of 2021 in London. Alyson says she wasn’t one bit impressed when Barry told her he was an actor, and didn’t care about his Hollywood pals. “He was saying he plays a superhero in a film. I went, ‘Who, Spider-Man?’ They’ve been together ever since and welcomed Brando in August. Barry is determined to give his newborn all the things he didn’t have growing up. “It’s indescribable,” Keoghan says of his new fatherhood. “It’s a love I’ve not felt before. You can learn from how you were raised. I have the chance to do the things that weren’t done for me.” Only 29, Barry seems to have an evolved sense of fame and its drawbacks. “You hate the parties,” Alyson says. And he agrees, calling fame “a world build on artificial things and fake promises.” Barry told GQ that he brings a stuffed toy everywhere with him – it used to belong to his late mom. “When I’m happiest, I feel like she’s with us,” he says. “Wherever that teddy is, or wherever Alyson or my boy is… that’s home for me now.” Source: gq.com

The gossip IG group "curators of pop culture" Deux Moi (@deuxmoi) has weighed in on an item named "Afterdark" about an Irish actor, if it could be Paul Mescal or Barry Keoghan; and some industry insiders have concluded the "agitated" and "promiscuous" behaviour seen at UK pubs corresponded to Mescal and not Keoghan. A leaked email Luckoftheirish@gmail.com was debated as belonging to either of them. According to an insider who was recently blocked from Paul Mescal's social media (and others): I wouldn’t call Barry a heartthrob. Barry Keoghan is not it. The Old Queens Head Pub is in Islington, London. Everyone in the area knows it's Paul Mescal. Right down the road from the theatre where he plays in A Streetcar Named Desire. Also just to clear this up, I know a director who worked with Barry Keoghan in one of his early films. He’s a great guy! Barry lives in a small town in North East Scotland now, and he keeps to himself. He's an ambassador for the Children's charity Barretstown. He’s very much in a relationship with the mother of his child. Not 100% sure they’re married. But this post is 100% Paul! The main clue is "Afterdark"/ "Aftersun".