It’s just a few hours before the 2024 Met Gala, and Barry Keoghan is pumping himself up by blaring music by his pals—the buzzy British rappers Dave and Central Cee—through his hotel suite’s Bluetooth speakers. “I love Cenchy,” the Irish actor says. “He’s my boy, him and Dave.”
Their track “Our 25th Birthday” buzzes on, and Cench’s voice rains down:
“I ain’t puttin’ no suit and tie on, I turned down the Met Gala.”
“Met Gala!” Keoghan shouts. “He said ‘Met Gala.’”
While Central Cee’s unyielding preference for tracksuits may be the dealbreaker keeping him from the hallowed Met steps, this will be Keoghan’s second go-around on fashion’s biggest red carpet. The actor just flew into New York City from his new homebase of London, where he visited his young son Brando, who was born in 2022. It’s been a hell of a year since Keoghan’s last Met, bookended by his first Oscar nomination for The Banshees of Inisherin and his first leading-man role in Emerald Fennell’s twisty aristocratic thriller Saltburn. Today, amid the waxing Met chaos, Keoghan is in a contemplative mood.
“It feels like it’s calmed down,” he says, reflecting on his last few months. “Everything’s calm, but that’s because I'm controllin’ it. Before, I didn’t really have control of it. I kind of want to set a new approach to everything as well. Felt like it was a bit too much for me.” All that pomp, he believes, “kind of contradicts me as an artist, as an actor.”
Keoghan sits in a white terry-cloth hotel robe while a makeup artist applies balm to his lips with a brush. The hotel suite is a bustling workshop strewn with open suitcases, grooming supplies, and a considerable array of beverages in situ: half-melted pink smoothies, ginger shots, coffee in all forms (iced, drip, espresso). He welcomes the chance to take a breather.
“I hate the idea of ‘made it,’ you know? I’m not in it to make it,” he says. At the suggestion of his friend Mark Ruffalo, Keoghan recently took up acting classes at the Stella Adler Academy in LA—not exactly a routine move for an Oscar-nominated actor still riding the coattails of a hit-movie comet. He’s trying to rediscover “what this does for me, trying to find that again. Because you get offered so many scripts and you get offered so much stuff that you can lose track a little.”
Acting itself serves other purposes, too: “I definitely am in it for some sort of selfish reasoning, in the sense of, I do benefit from how it makes me feel but also that I learn a lot about myself. I get to put a lot of closure on stuff and to revisit certain moments of my life,” Keoghan admits. “I don’t even like the idea of people being paid to act. I’d like to be paid for the other bullshit, but I don’t want to be paid for something that’s therapeutic. Between action and cut, and the whole getting the part and discovering the part, the process is all for me. You can pay me for the rest of the stuff.”
This mode of reflection ties into his Met Gala ensemble, a tawny velvet three-piece suit custom-made by Burberry with a frill-trimmed dress shirt, a silky cream ribbon tie wound tautly up to his chin, and a tall black top hat. The inspiration, sure enough, is the Mad Hatter, a very thespian nod to this year’s “Garden of Time” dress code. “And I ain’t mad!” he jokes. “I ain’t that mad.” What are the chances, after all, that he landed in this garden to begin with?
Doubling down on the Carrollian factor, Keoghan is wearing a trio of Omega watches, though only two of them are functioning. He and his stylist, Ilaria Urbinati, decide to set the working pair to London and Dublin time, while the non-working third is set to a poetic “nowhere.”
This third watch, the actor explains, is “because I want to give time a chance to stand still. It’s always ticking forward.” A ticking clock, a crashing wave, a heartbeat—all reliable, dependable progressions. “There’s a lot of rhythm there that comforts me. It’s like the mother’s heartbeat, you search for that. It comforts us.”
Suddenly, it’s time to get a move on. Keoghan begins to dress, searching for spare deodorant and receiving a touch-up on the hair straightener. (“Can we get a few more spikes?”)
Tonight, I ask, is there anything you’re especially looking forward to?
“Honestly, no,” he says, neutrally. Again, he’s trying to slow down these days. “I can’t wait for tomorrow, ’til it’s over.” (There may have been at least one thing, though: a few hours later, once the bulk of the posing was over with, Keoghan quietly linked up with his girlfriend, the singer Sabrina Carpenter, at the top of the Met Gala steps. There’s a non-zero chance they heard Carpenter’s song-of-the-summer contender “Espresso,” a flirty earworm that mentions “this one boy” who’s crazy about her, at least a dozen times throughout the night.)
But the night’s train is in motion, and Keoghan’s team ushers him upstairs for the next stop: a Burberry photoshoot. As he steps in front of the cameras, I turn to head out.
“Wait,” he calls out. “There’s more I want to say. Can I send it to ya in a voice recording?”
Alas, on this busy evening, we’re out of time.
