Barry Keoghan doesn’t like the idea of ​​people getting paid to trade

It’s just hours before the 2024 Met Gala, and Barry Keoghan is pumping himself up by blasting music from his friends – vibrant British rappers Dave and Central Cee – through his hotel suite’s Bluetooth speakers. “I love Cenchy,” says the Irish actor. “He’s my boy, him and Dave.”

Their song ‘Our 25th Birthday’ hums along, and Cench’s voice rains:

“I’m not wearing a suit and tie, 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 that keeps him from the hallowed Met steps, this will be Keoghan’s second break on fashion’s biggest red carpet. The actor just flew to New York City from his new home base of London, where he visited his young son Brando, who was born in 2022. It’s been a great year since Keoghan’s last Met, bookended by his first Oscar nomination for The Banshees of Inisherin and his first leading role in Emerald Fennell’s twisty aristocratic thriller Salt burn. These days, amid the growing chaos of the Met, Keoghan is in a contemplative mood.

“It feels like it’s calmed down,” he says, looking back on his final months. ‘Everything is calm, but that’s because I have control over it. Before, I didn’t really have control over it. I actually want to institute a new approach to everything as well. It felt like it was a little too much for me.” All that splendor, he believes, ‘contradicts me as an artist, as an actor.’

Keoghan sits in a white terrycloth hotel robe as a makeup artist applies balm to his lips with a brush. The hotel suite is a bustling workshop littered with open suitcases, grooming supplies and a substantial range of drinks on the spot: semi-melted pink smoothies, ginger shots, coffee in all forms (iced, drip, espresso). He welcomes the chance to catch his breath.

“I hate the idea of ​​’made it,’ you know?” I have no desire to make it,” he says. At the suggestion of his friend Mark Ruffalo, Keoghan recently took acting classes at the Stella Adler Academy in LA – not exactly a routine move for an Oscar-nominated actor still in the tail of a comet. He tries to rediscover “what this does to me, and tries to find that again. Because you are offered so many scripts and so many things that you can lose the overview a bit.”