Barry Keoghan Had A Makeup Request For The Joker’s Look In ‘The Batman’

Barry Keoghan excels at playing dangerous weirdos. No one has eaten spaghetti or betrayed Dev Patel with more menace than the 29-year-old Irish actor, who was a natural fit to play cinema’s most tWiStEd clown, the Joker.

Keoghan made his DC movie debut in The Batman, where he appeared as “Unseen Arkham Prisoner” (later confirmed as, duh, the Joker in a deleted scene). In an interview with GQ UK, he described the Joker as being “a bit charming and a bit hurt,” and shared his one request for playing the character to director Matt Reeves.

Beneath heavy prosthetics that make him look like a maniac run through a meat grinder, Keoghan insisted his blue eyes stayed the same. “I wanted some sort of human in there behind the makeup,” he says. “I want people to relate to him… [to know] this is a façade he puts on.” The character is, to Keoghan, “a broken-down boy.”

Keoghan is also proud that his Joker finished fourth on a list of the best on-screen Jokers. “There were seven and I was number four. Lads, with four minutes of screen time, not bad eh!” he joked. Even if Keoghan had dropped his pants and farted in Batman’s face (anything is possible with Keoghan), he still wouldn’t have finished last.