Barry Keoghan On His ‘Bird’ Musical Number In The Wake Of That ‘Saltburn’ Ending: “I Don’t Think I Can Dance, I’m A Bad Dancer” – Cannes

Anthony D'Alessandro
·2 min read

After prancing through the hallways showing his man-ness at the end of Saltburn last year, Barry Keoghan is back with a another illustrious ditty performance in Bird. In the Andrea Arnold movie that had its world premiere Thursday night at the Cannes Film Festival, Keoghan plays a young father, and at one moment he croons an off-key version of Blur’s “The Universal” in what is a sweet moment with dance involved.

For the actor, music is part of the full commitment to the roles he plays.

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“I don’t think I can dance. I’m a bad dancer,” the Oscar-nominated actor confessed during a post-premiere press conference in Cannes on Friday. “I think the beauty of dancing on screen is the effort to try.”

“Music plays a big part in everything I do, I know Andrea is hooked on music as well,” he said at the Cannes presser for the film. The filmmaker surrounding Keoghan with a playlist.

Arnold’s latest follows Bailey (Nykiya Adams), who lives with her brother Hunter (Jason Buda) and his father Bug (Keoghan), who raises them alone in a squat in northern Kent. Bug doesn’t have much time to devote to them. Bailey looks for attention and adventure elsewhere.

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More musical moments in the film finds Keoghan’s Bug making money for his wedding by playing “sincere” music to a toad to produce hallucinogenic slime. His character and his posse wind up serenading the amphibian to Coldplay’s “Yellow.” (Funny enough, “Murder on the Dancefloor,” the song that he danced to in Saltburn, is rejected as a song for the creature).

Arnold says her creative process to screenwriting begins with one image, and in the case of Bird that happened to by an image “of a tall man with a thin penis. There was a mist around him. Didn’t know if he was good or bad, or if he was an alien.”

That said, she didn’t say if there was a connection between seeing, or knowing previously, about Keoghan’s naked shenanigans in Salburn.

“I go on this long journey of trying to figure out what the image means,” she said.

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