Barry Keoghan will play Billy The Kid

Boasting accolades for her recent work (including an Academy Award nomination for The Banshees of Inisherin), Barry Keoghan tries to attack while the iron is hot and prepares his own draws. He is now pushing a biopic of Billy the Kid, which is a film that the actor has wanted to do for a long time.

“We’ve seen many versions of Billy the Kid on screen before,” says Keoghan. Expiration. “My interest was in trying to tell a version that could break through the facade of this cool, cool, composed gunslinger that we’re all used to seeing. I wanted to humanize it in some way.

The film, which will reunite Keoghan with his american animals Director Bart Layton aims to examine the Kid’s Irish ancestry and troubled childhood. Born in New York as Henry McCarty, he was orphaned at age 15 when his mother died and his stepfather abandoned him. His first arrest for theft came a year later, and at age 18 he was wanted for murder after an altercation in Arizona. His notoriety grew from there, and he was 21 when he was shot by Sheriff Pat Garrett.

Keoghan, who grew up in foster care, sees a kindred spirit in Billy. “I remember reading about him as a kid, but by digging into the project we learned a lot about his life,” he says. “There are so many eyewitness accounts and so many different versions of the story of him that don’t add up but add to the legend.”

And he convinced Layton to come on board while they were doing it. american animals. “The more we looked at the story and its truth, the more interesting the perspective became,” Layton says. “Our understanding of Billy the Kid is really the comic book version. But the more we researched and discussed, the more it seemed like something Barry was born to do. There’s a cornered-kid aspect to Billy that I think Barry really understands, and not all of the violence he was immortalized for was intentional or premeditated. It was largely circumstances that propelled him forward.

Hunter Andrews has written the final version of the script and the film is expected to shoot early next year.