Barry Keoghan

Barry Keoghan got his first acting job by answering a casting call he saw in a shop window in Dublin. He was seventeen and had no training. Before that, his childhood had been marked by loss: his mother struggled with heroin addiction and died of an overdose when he was twelve, and he and his younger brother spent years in foster care, moving through more than a dozen homes before their grandmother and aunt took them in.

He was born on October 18, 1992, in Dublin. Nobody has published the hour of his birth, so his Ascendant is a blank, but the rest of the chart has plenty to say. His Sun is in late Libra, a sign of charm and of an instinct for reading other people. Libra wants to please, and Keoghan has an unusually disarming presence, which makes it all the more unnerving when his characters turn menacing.

Mercury, Venus and Pluto are all in Scorpio. Scorpio is the sign of secrets, obsession and dark undercurrents, and Pluto is its ruler. A Scorpio emphasis like this describes an actor drawn to disturbing, intense roles, and Keoghan's most memorable performances are unsettling: the eerie, vengeful teenager of The Killing of a Sacred Deer, the obsessive outsider of Saltburn and the troubled young man in The Banshees of Inisherin.

His Moon and Mars are both in Cancer, the sign of home, family and emotional memory. A Cancer Moon needs security and belonging, and Mars there channels drive into protecting one's own. Keoghan has spoken about how the instability of his childhood shaped him, and about how fiercely he wants to give his own son, Brando, born in 2022, the stability he lacked.

After his first role, in the Dublin crime drama Between the Canals, he worked steadily in Irish and British films, including '71 and Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk, in which he played a teenage boy aboard a civilian boat. American Animals, Eternals and The Batman, in which he made a brief, chilling appearance as the Joker, followed.

Jupiter, at the very start of Libra, suggests opportunities that come through partnership and collaboration. In 2023 he won the BAFTA for best supporting actor and earned an Academy Award nomination for his role as the lonely, vulnerable Dominic in The Banshees of Inisherin, opposite Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson.

Saturn in Aquarius, along with Uranus and Neptune in Capricorn, describes a determined, unconventional path. Keoghan has continued to take unusual roles, including in Andrea Arnold's Bird, and he was cast as Ringo Starr in Sam Mendes's planned series of Beatles films.

The Libra Sun gave him the charm; the Scorpio planets gave him the darkness that makes audiences unable to look away.

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