Fresh off his recent Oscar nomination for The Banshees of Inisherin, Barry Keoghan is turning his attention towards what’s reportedly a dream assignment for his next project. The Irish actor is set to star in a retelling of the story of Billy The Kid. He’ll reteam with Bart Layton, who he worked with on American Animals, for the film.
The project will lean into the Kid’s Irish ancestry and complicated childhood. Born in New York as Henry McCarty, he was orphaned at the age of 15 when his mother died and his stepfather abandoned him. His first arrest for robbery came a year later, and by the time he was 18, he was wanted for murder after an altercation in Arizona.
His notoriety escalated from there, and he was 21 when Sheriff Pat Garrett shot him to death. Keoghan, who lost his own mother when he was just 12 years old and grew up in the foster system, says he understood the pressures McCarty faced that edged him toward a life of crime and the desperate choices he made that resulted:
“I remember reading about him as a kid, but as we were digging into the project, there were so many things we discovered about his life. There are so many eyewitness accounts, and lots of different versions of his story that didn’t add up but that contributed to the legend.
I wanted to step outside of the legend that was built up by the papers and tackle the pressure he must have felt from those early days. He was running his whole life.”
There have been many prior silver screen depictions of Billy The Kid, with the most famous being Sam Peckinpah‘s Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid, Howard Hughes‘ The Outlaw, and Arthur Penn‘s The Left Handed Gun. Billy was most recently depicted in 2021’s Old Henry by Tim Blake Nelson.
Keoghan apparently introduced Layton to the idea back when they were making American Animals, which itself merged fact and fiction in different ways. So this sounds like the perfect second collaboration for the two – another true story where truth and legend are hard to disentangle.
Keoghan first attempted to set the film up at the beginning of 2020, but the pandemic interfered. Now, with a new script by Hunter Andrews, he’s eager to get going. Layton reportedly hopes to begin production in early 2024.
#Peace.Love.BillyTheKid
