Barry Keoghan Doesn't “Like the Idea of People Being Paid to Act”

Acting itself serves other purposes, too: “I definitely am in it for some sort of selfish reasoning, in the sense of, I do benefit from how it makes me feel but also that I learn a lot about myself. I get to put a lot of closure on stuff and to revisit certain moments of my life,” Keoghan admits. “I don’t even like the idea of people being paid to act. I’d like to be paid for the other bullshit, but I don’t want to be paid for something that’s therapeutic. Between action and cut, and the whole getting the part and discovering the part, the process is all for me. You can pay me for the rest of the stuff.”

This mode of reflection ties into his Met Gala ensemble, a tawny velvet three-piece suit custom-made by Burberry with a frill-trimmed dress shirt, a silky cream ribbon tie wound tautly up to his chin, and a tall black top hat. The inspiration, sure enough, is the Mad Hatter, a very thespian nod to this year’s “Garden of Time” dress code. “And I ain’t mad!” he jokes. “I ain’t that mad.” What are the chances, after all, that he landed in this garden to begin with?

Doubling down on the Carrollian factor, Keoghan is wearing a trio of Omega watches, though only two of them are functioning. He and his stylist, Ilaria Urbinati, decide to set the working pair to London and Dublin time, while the non-working third is set to a poetic “nowhere.”

This third watch, the actor explains, is “because I want to give time a chance to stand still. It’s always ticking forward.” A ticking clock, a crashing wave, a heartbeat—all reliable, dependable progressions. “There’s a lot of rhythm there that comforts me. It’s like the mother’s heartbeat, you search for that. It comforts us.”