Barry Keoghan says that the online vitriol he receives because of the way that he looks makes him want to stay inside.
During a candid interview on Sirius XM’s The Morning Mash Up, the actor spoke out about the negativity he experiences that is changing his relationship to fame. “There’s a lot of hate online,” he admitted. “There’s a lot of abuse of how I look, and it’s kind of past the point of — you know, everyone goes through that… but it’s made me shy away. It’s made me really go inside myself, not want to attend places, not want to go outside.”
Calling it “a problem,” Keoghan added that while he has “removed himself” from social media, he still checks in occasionally to see how people are talking about him after public appearances.
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“I’m still a curious human being that wants to go on [the internet],” he noted. “And if I attend an event or if I go somewhere, you want to see how it’s received. And it’s not nice, you know?”
The actor expressed that his withdrawal from the public eye could impact his acting career. “When that starts leaking into your art, it becomes a problem because then you don’t want to even be on screen anymore,” he said, before pointing out that the abuse could also one day reach his son, Brando, who was born in 2022. “It is disappointing for the fans, but it’s also disappointing that my little boy has to read all of this stuff when he gets older.”
Keoghan will appear in the forthcoming Beatles biopic films as Ringo Starr. He’ll be joined by Joseph Quinn as George Harrison, Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, and Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney.
The four films, which are currently set to be released simultaneously in 2028, will each focus on a different member of the band. In an interview on Sirius XM’s The Julia Cunningham Show, Keoghan called his costars his “brothers” when expressing his excitement for the films.
Last May, Keoghan admitted that he was “nervous” when he first met Starr (who’s going on tour in May) ahead of the Beatles biopic films. “When I was talking to him, I couldn’t look at him. I was nervous, like right now. But he’s like, ‘You can look at me,’” Keoghan recalled on Jimmy Kimmel Live!. “My job is to observe and kinda take in mannerisms and study him. I want to humanise him and bring feelings to it and not just sort of imitate.”