Yahoo Lifestyle Barry Keoghan Said He’s Still Haunted By His Late Mom “Screaming Through The Letterbox” Begging For Money Amid Her Heroin Addiction As It’s One Of The Last Times He Heard Her Voice
This article mentions substance abuse and addiction.
Barry Keoghan has always been open about his difficult childhood, with his mom dying from a heroin overdose when he was just 12 years old.
Little is known about the Irish star’s father, but Barry previously revealed that he and his younger brother, Eric, were taken into foster care when he was 5 years old.
The brothers spent the next four years being moved around 13 different homes and seeing their mom under supervision on weekends.
When he was 9, Barry’s grandmother and aunt managed to get him and Eric out of the foster system, and the two boys moved in with them and their older sister, Gemma, who gave up work to help look after her younger brothers.
All five family members lived together in a two-bedroom house in Summerhill — one of the most economically deprived areas of Dublin, Ireland.
Three years after moving in with his relatives, Barry's mom died. Recalling the heartbreaking moment that he and Eric were told the sad news, the star previously told JOE: “My nanny and my auntie told us. It wasn’t a nice day; it was the worst day of my life. I was about 12, but there was something in me that I just took it, and it made me stronger.”
Barry ended up falling into acting when he answered an open casting call in his late teens, and he earned recognition in his home country of Ireland when he landed a breakout role in the popular RTÉ TV series Love/Hate in 2013.
The actor’s global breakthrough came in 2017, when he was cast in the movie Dunkirk, but he was really catapulted to fame at the end of 2023 thanks to his standout performance in Saltburn.
And in a new in-depth interview on The Louis Theroux Podcast, Barry opened up some more about his childhood as he fondly remembered his “beautiful” mom.
Discussing how she fell victim to a heroin epidemic that was sweeping his hometown of Summerhill at the time, Barry told Louis: “My mom, she was lovely. She was gorgeous, almost like six-foot, dark hair, just beautiful. Like, every lad was chasing her, and this thing caught her, like many families.”
“It's sad to see the deterioration of people around the area and see people kind of struggle with it and the recovery they're in now,” he added. “It caught my mom, it caught my uncle, who died of it, and caught my father as well.”
Barry previously admitted that he resonated with the 1995 Leonardo DiCaprio movie The Basketball Diaries because of his personal connection to the storyline. For reference, the movie tells the true story of Jim Carroll, played by Leonardo, who became addicted to heroin while in high school.
Speaking to Louis, Barry revealed that he’d since met Leo, and took the opportunity to discuss the film with him. He said: “I remember meeting Leonardo DiCaprio and saying it to him, what that movie meant to me.”
Referencing a heart-wrenching scene in the film where Jim bangs on his mom’s front door and desperately begs for money while suffering from withdrawal — only for his mom to break down in tears while locking him out of her home — Barry added: “There was a scene in that movie where he comes to the front door, and that actual scene happened at my granny's house.”
“I remember laying in bed and [my mom] screaming through the letterbox, just wanting money, and we had to lay in bed and my aunt and granny was like: ‘Just don't go down,’” he recalled. “That haunts me. That was one of the last times I heard her, like, her voice, and that stuff haunts me.”
Elsewhere in the podcast, Barry made it clear that he holds no ill feelings toward his mom for her addiction, saying: “I don't blame her. It's a sickness.”
“She was just unable to look after us,” Barry explained. “My father wasn't there and so we got taken into care and no one knew about this. I think she was too embarrassed to tell my granny [we were in care], and so no one knew. That's when we went through all that; all the different homes.”
“That kind of haunts me still, you don't forget those things,” he said of his time in foster care. “You don't forget waiting on the social worker steps and waiting for the new family to come and play with you in the playground they have in the office and see if it's going to work and then go with them to a whole new area and a whole new home.”
And Barry admitted that growing up in so many different homes has left him with “trust issues,” sharing: “It's like, how can you trust anything? When you get attached to a family and then: ‘Oh, you’ve got to go [to another foster home] now.’”
He then took the opportunity to say that all the families he and his brother stayed with were “incredible,” but explained: “It's just all these different families; I can't trust anything. I'm only getting around to it now. I never trusted when someone said they love me; I never trusted the process ever.”
“I’d always think: ‘Nah, this isn't real,’” Barry said. “I’m very aware of it, and working [on it] through therapy, but I'm just getting around to it. Trust is a massive thing.”
Barry also discussed the way that his upbringing has been treated as a “pity story” in the media, insisting that he doesn’t speak about it to get sympathy from people. Instead, he hopes to inspire other children who may be in a similar situation to the one he was once in.
“I feel it's been publicized in a pity story way,” he said of his past. “You know: ‘Oh God bless him, his mom passed away [from] heroin and touring foster homes,’ [I’ve] actually seen that on an article.”
“That's not what I'm looking for,” Barry went on. “If anything, I speak about it to let younger kids know that no matter where you come from, you can always achieve what you put your mind to and not to give up and stay persistent on it. It's for that reason I do it, solely for that reason. It's not to make anyone pity me because I don't need to.”
This echoes what Barry said when he won the Best Supporting Actor BAFTA in February 2023 for his performance in The Banshees of Inisherin, with the star saying in his acceptance speech: “For my mother and also for the kids that are dreaming to be something from the area that I came from. This is for you.”
And Barry hasn’t forgotten his Summerhill roots amid his rise to fame, with the star telling Louis that he hopes to open a youth center there with Olympic boxer Kellie Harrington, who is also from the area.
It’ll be an employment opportunity for adults in the area, and also a place for kids to go after school to “have some food” and “nurture” whatever they are passionate about, with Barry saying that he wants the young people in his hometown to see that they have a “chance.”
You can listen to Barry’s full interview on The Louis Theroux Podcast, which is available on Spotify now.
If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse, you can call SAMHSA’s National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357) and find more resources here.
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