can’t be selfish, and you kind of forget to do things, like look after yourself …” he pauses, with a sudden laugh, the first of many. “I’m being a cheek, here, because my partner is the one who actually does everything, you know? I’ll be quite honest, she’s absolutely golden–you couldn’t ask for a better mother. If Alyson heard me saying, ‘Oh, yeah, you lose sleep, and you forget to look after yourself,’ she’d go, ‘You have a cheek!’” And Alyson would be right. Keoghan has such an en- gaging audacity in his manner that it’s near tangible even via a smartphone, and it’s shot through with a generous dose of conversational enthusiasm. In short, he’s a strikingly posi- tive and affable guy, but I can’t help but wonder if that glint in his eye is a by-product of his untypical, and one can only imagine a challenging upbringing–being raised between the care system and his grandmother following the tragic death of his mother to a heroin overdose when he was just 12 years old. I suspect such verve may be born of survival, which leads
me to ask if the passing of his mother is actually what gave him his drive. “That’s something I think of all the time,” he says, thoughtfully.
“Whether without the care system, and all of that, I would have had that drive. And you know what? I don’t know if I can answer it. It is definitely responsible for me wanting to make something of myself, now for my own family, and my little baby–that’s a new drive, as well, a new chapter, which is absolutely beautiful. But did all of that give me a drive? Yeah. It gave me ammunition, if you want to put it in that way. It was also a way of dealing with it, you know? Kind of express- ing some pain through this form of therapy, as I like to call it–playing with characters and not really kind of confronting what’s there in front you, but doing it in a different sense, by putting on someone else’s shoes and delving into someone
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