Today’s news is that we almost lost Barry Keoghan before ever seeing him slurp up Jacob Elordi’s sperm-tinted bathwater. The actor reveals in a new GQ profile that shortly before filming The Banshees Of Inisherin, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award, he suffered from a case of necrotizing fasciitis. If you’re not a doctor or a Grey’s Anatomy fan, this flesh-eating bacterial infection with a one-in-five mortality rate. Yet Barry Keoghan lived to tell the tale.
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It was touch and go for a second, though, it sounds like: Keoghan remembers asking his doctors for reassurance that he wasn’t going to die and getting the response, “Well, we don’t know.” Keoghan was visited in the hospital by his Banshees director Martin McDonagh, who apparently encouraged him to “remember this when you’ve been nominated for an Oscar”—a prophecy that did indeed come to pass.
“I’m not sure if he was on a lot of meds, but he seemed to shrug it off,” McDonagh recalls in the profile. “We were only about four days out from shooting, and his arm was puffed up. But he was like, ‘Yeah, no, I’m going to be fine—I’ll see you on Tuesday.’ I went to the hospital thinking, Shit—is he going to die? Let alone, is he going to make the movie. But I came out of there energized and looking forward to it.”
Keoghan was at risk for amputation, but he managed to survive with nothing more than a scar winding its way up his arm, which probably just adds to the Irish star’s singular look. These days, Saltburn has made him an object of lust, but he’s well aware that he’s been “looked at as the weird-looking guy, the unique feckin’ freaky little freak man-child, freak child-man, whatever you want to call it.” He’s now transitioning out of his “Little freak child-man era,” he says, “And now I’m just Man. Freak-Man. Man-Freak.” Man-Freak And The Flesh-Eating Disease: coming soon to a theater near you.