Barry Keoghan's Wild Ride

He's one of our most exciting actors-a combustible shape-shifter onscreen, a moon-howling dynamo off it. And he spent the last couple years achieving his Hollywood aspirations at an absurd clip. Now, Barry Keoghan is confronting a rather novel dilemma: deciding which dreams to manifest next.

- By Alex Pappademas. Photographs by Jason Nocito

I'm Supposed to Meet Barry Keoghan at 9:30 in the morning at a boxing club just off Melrose Avenue in Hollywood, so I can watch him do the thing he loved most to do before he started acting, and maybe do it with him. We'd met for the first time the day before, and at the end of that hang I admitted that I'd never actually boxed. "I'll show you a good jab or two, my man," the Dublin-born actor had promised, or cheerfully threatened. But when I roll up at 9:27, Keoghan is already sweaty, invigorated, and finished working out for the day; he'd like to go someplace else.

Around 20 minutes later, he's stepping onto the rooftop pool deck at the Four Seasons. This is more like it. He's feeling good-"Feckin' happy, for once," he says, sounding like he means it. He drops his boxing gloves under a chaise and stretches out for some sun.

Keoghan lives in London, has a baby son there, but he's been staying here a while, living the abstract pampered life of an actor doing the promo rounds for a buzzy awards-season movie that's expanding from seven screens to 1,500-plus on the day we meet. He digs LA, a good place to howl at the moon: "I howl every night, man. Wooo00." He laughs-maybe not every night. (The root of "Keoghan" is "cano," which means "wolf cub" in Gaelic. "It's crazy, man," Keoghan says. "It's crazy, the connection-me and wolves.") But last night, he says, he just looked out at the Hollywood sign, having a moment: "Just takin' it all in, man. There's a gorgeous feelin' here. This mystic kind of haze. This subtle thing I feel hereit's like a romance I hold with it. I'm in love with it."