Barry Keoghan hits out at ‘disgusting’ online trolls using his son against him

Oscar nominee Barry Keoghan has hit back at “disgusting” online trolls who he claimed use his relationship with his son as “ammunition” against him.

The 32-year-old Irish actor, who is dating US singer-songwriter Sabrina Carpenter, has a two-year-old son, Brando, with his former partner.

Speaking on the Louis Theroux podcast, he spoke extensively about the damaging impact of online trolling, as well as his own difficult childhood in foster care and the death of his mother after struggling with drug addiction.

“People kind of have a judgment on me as a parent,” said Keoghan. “I’m like, well until you’ve walked a day in my shoes growing up as a kid, then you can’t comment. There’s a lot online. If I didn’t have tough skin or the strength I have, I wouldn’t be sitting here. Of course, [my childhood] is going to affect me being a father when I had no blueprint to take from.

“People just read that [as] laziness and go: ‘Oh, that’s no excuse to be an absent father’. I’m not an absent father.

“But people love to use my son as ammunition or whatever. And it kind of leads me to stop, the more attention I’ve got lately and the more in the public I’ve become, the less I’ve posted about my child, because I don’t think it’s fair to put my child online.”

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Keoghan said his son’s absence from his social media means “people draw a narrative and go ‘absent father, shit, deadbeat dad’ and more disgusting things I wouldn’t even repeat. Just the audacity of some people, man, it sickens me and makes me furious.”

The Saltburn actor, who is filming for the Netflix film of Peaky Blinders, said he is “just trying to get a good body of work and create safety for my child”.

Keoghan won the Bafta best supporting actor prize in 2023 for his role in the dark comedy The Banshees of Inisherin, for which he also received an Oscar nod.

He spoke in a similar vein about the trolls who comment on his appearance, “especially on TikTok … people can sit there and make videos and be like ‘I don’t like his face, he looks weird, or he looks evil’ and just pick you apart”.

The actor grew up in Dublin and lived in several different foster homes before living with his grandmother. His mother died when he was 12 and his father died when he was 15.

He told the podcast that his mother was “gorgeous, almost like six-foot, dark hair, just beautiful”.

He said it was “sad to see the deterioration of people around the area” because of drug addiction. “It caught my mum, it caught my uncle who died of it and caught my father as well,” he said.

The actor added that he does not “blame” his mother and said the experience of going to more than 10 foster places “kind of haunts me still”. But he said he wants his upbringing to be seen as inspiration to young children and not as a “pity story”.