Barry Keoghan talked about his upbringing in foster care and the long-term effects it had on his life.
While filming the next Peaky Blinders movie, in which he co-stars alongside Cillian Murphy, the Oscar-nominated actor made an appearance on This Life of Mine with James Corden.
He opened up to the former late-night host about the challenges he and his brother had after their mother’s addiction left her unable to care for them.
“As a kid, you don’t know what’s going on,” he said. “You have no kind of gauge on, ‘This is a process, and we’re going to go to a next home.’ You arrive and like, ‘This is it.’ And then you get took and you go to another one and that starts to affect you as you grow up and wherever. … You don’t trust the process of anything. You have a problem with attachment and abandonment.”
He clarified that he has worked on a lot of this with a number of therapists over the years and that he has felt it, particularly when he goes through significant life events like becoming a father and seeing his first film come out.
“It just comes back and knocks on the door,” The Banshees of Inisherin star said.
“Never trusted love, never trusted that someone wanted to know me or, let’s say, be a friend, for instance. I always kind of questioned it. You’re hard-wired differently. You have to really be aware and be honest and be brutally honest with yourself and to work on these things.”
Keoghan and his ex-girlfriend Alyson Sandro have a 2-year-old kid named Brando.
These factors are now more important than they were before having a child because he has no blueprint or experience with his own father, who was not present in his upbringing, to refer to. “I didn’t have any,” he revealed.
In November, the Saltburn star talked candidly about his experiences on The Louis Theroux Podcast. Between the ages of five and eight, he and his brother lived with his grandmother at one point and then in 14 foster homes, which were made up of 13 families.
Because he doesn’t post or talk about his son very much, people have accused the actor of being an absentee father as his life has become more public due to his past relationship with Sabrina Carpenter and more well-known films.
“The more public I’ve become, the less I’ve posted about my child because I don’t think it is fair to put my child online,” he said.
“There’s a lot [of abuse] online. If I didn’t have tough skin or the strength to have, I wouldn’t be sitting here.”
