32-year-old actor Barry Keoghan is one of the world’s hottest stars right now. For the past few years, his star has been rising in Hollywood, with significant roles in movies like Dunkirk (2017), The Green Knight (2021), Eternals (2021), The Batman (2022), The Banshees of Inisherin (2022), Saltburn (2023), Bird (2024), and Bring Them Down (2024).
His personal life seems to be going pretty well, too — Keoghan has been in a serious relationship with the beautiful and talented American singer-songwriter Sabrina Carpenter since late 2023. However, there’s still something that regularly bothers the Academy Award-nominated star.
Keoghan is a father to a son, Brando, from his relationship with dental nurse and orthodontic therapist Alyson Kierans, and the little boy’s birth was announced on Aug. 8, 2022. He used to post about Brando reasonably regularly on his X account but has done so less lately, resulting in some cruel assumptions about him as a father by the public.
In an interview with British journalist Louis Theroux on The Louis Theroux Podcast, Keoghan had the following to say about the matter:
People kind of have a judgment on me as a parent and I’m like, ‘Well until you’ve walked a day in my shoes growing up as a kid… then you can comment.’ There’s a lot online. If I didn’t have tough skin or the strength, I wouldn’t be sitting here. Of course, it’s 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.’ But I am not an absent father. The more attention I’ve gotten 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. There are sick people out there. Because I reigned that in, people draw a narrative and go, ‘Absent father, s—t, deadbeat dad,’ and more disgusting things I wouldn’t even repeat. Just the audacity of some people, man, it sickens me. It makes me furious.
Keoghan was born into a troubled family in Dublin, Ireland, on Oct. 18, 1992. His own father was entirely absent from his life, and his mother died when he was 12 after struggling with drug addiction. That troubled upbringing has made him incredibly determined to be an excellent father to his son, making the incorrect assumptions about him even more hurtful. Evidently, he has only stopped posting about his son online to protect him from the world’s media. It’s an admirable thing to do. When Pop Crave posted about it on their X account, Keoghan’s fans leaped to his defense.
How did X react to Barry Keoghan defending himself as a father?
The response was one of near-universal love for Barry Keoghan, with his fans’ comments ranging from those pointing out that people love to have opinions on things they know nothing about to those referencing the actor’s previous comments about the day Brando was born being the best day of his life. Frankly, it was nice to see.
It’s hard being in the public eye. The world is harsh, and some people love to criticize at every opportunity — even when the criticism isn’t warranted. Keoghan is, for all intents and purposes, an attentive father who loves his son a lot. We wish him all the best in his most important role.