Bar­ry Keoghan-mania will con­tin­ue with a Bil­ly the Kid biopic

Present-day cinephiles revis­it­ing films from the ​’70s often find them­selves bemoan­ing today’s dearth of Guys with Faces, the class of actor with a hard­scrab­ble back­ground vis­i­ble in their idio­syn­crat­i­cal­ly dis­tinc­tive look. With Hol­ly­wood cur­rent­ly flood­ed by zero-per­cent-body-fat Ken dolls pur­su­ing a uni­form ide­al of Insta­gram-approved facial per­fec­tion, a per­former like Bar­ry Keoghan reminds us of all we stand to lose.

As he’s racked up his first Acad­e­my Award nom­i­na­tion and a wheel­bar­row of acco­lades for his turn as a sim­ple­mind­ed rur­al boy in The Ban­shees of Inish­erin, the mount­ing favor for the excit­ing young actor has explod­ed into full-blown Keoghan-mania unlike­ly to abate any time soon. He’s already got upcom­ing gigs lined up in Emer­ald Fen­nell​‘s next fea­ture as well as a mys­tery col­lab­o­ra­tion with Christo­pher Abbott, and today brings the news that he’s also added a Bil­ly the Kid biopic to his docket.

Dead­line reports that Keoghan will reteam with his Amer­i­can Ani­mals direc­tor Bart Lay­ton on a film dra­ma­tiz­ing the life and times of the fastest gun in the Old West, a long­time pas­sion project for the actor. He’s giv­en the sig­nif­i­cance of this larg­er-than-life fig­ure some thought, telling Dead­line, ​“My inter­est was in try­ing to tell a ver­sion that breaks from the façade of that cool, calm, and col­lect­ed gun­slinger Bil­ly the Kid that we’re all used to see­ing. I want­ed to human­ize him in a way.”

Sounds a lot like the approach The Green Knight (in which Keoghan played one of the creepy lit­tle weir­does he does so well) took to the mythol­o­gy of Arthuri­an leg­end, a decon­struc­tive film very much in keep­ing with Keoghan’s ten­den­cy toward ground­ed imper­fec­tion. Through the wild array of roles he’s assayed in his still-young career, from an affect­less sociopath in The Killing of a Sacred Deer to a mind-con­trol­ling demigod in Eter­nals to a mar­tyred sol­dier in Dunkirk, the con­nect­ing thread has been his inter­est in explor­ing the frail­ties and flaws in strange personalities.

Which brings us back to his indeli­ble face: the boy­ish yet weath­ered expres­sion mak­ing it impos­si­ble to guess his age, those ice-blue eyes set deep in their sock­ets, a shit-eat­ing grin hint­ing at a life­time of barfights. He looks like he’s lived because he has, sent through thir­teen fos­ter homes in sev­en years with his broth­er as kids. He’s a true-blue movie star of a vari­ety seen less and less these days, and the good news is he’s not going anywhere.