Barry Keoghan’s connection to Barry Keoghan Lemonade foster care drama runs far deeper than an executive producer credit. The film, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, draws directly on his own childhood in the Irish foster care system, and making it, he says, meant digging into memories he has carried for decades.
A Story Rooted in His Own Childhood
Lemonade, directed by Kim Bartley, follows Danny, an 18-year-old aging out of the foster care system in Ireland. Lewis Brophy plays Danny; Keoghan plays Danny’s former social worker, who re-enters his life and tries to mentor him. The casting has its own full-circle logic. Keoghan has spoken before about how he first got into acting after spotting a notice in a shop window. That shop, it turns out, belongs to Brophy’s aunt.
Keoghan executive-produced the film through Wolfcub Productions, the company he started with his friend Dessie Byrne. The project, he says, felt personal from the moment he encountered Bartley’s script. ‘It’s a very, very personal story,’ he told GQ. ‘I loved Kim’s work beforehand and I knew her, so it did feel really right.’
Several members of the cast and crew share a background in the foster care system. For Keoghan, the script unlocked specific, physical memories. Flashback scenes showing Danny as a younger child in the back seat of a car were particularly hard to watch from the outside. ‘I remember those car journeys of being in the back myself,’ he said, ‘and social workers bringing me to the new home or back to the office to “rehouse”.’ He recalled the stickers on the back window, a Pink Panther teddy, looking up at the moon. The phrase ‘your moon is my moon,’ he said, ‘was the kind of thing that was drilled into me.’
Playing the social worker gave him a way to honour the people who shaped his early life. He named three of them: Mary Payne, from Daughters of Charity (‘God rest her soul’), and social workers called William and Liz. ‘I remember them being very gentle and caring figures to me when I didn’t have those parental figures around,’ he said. ‘They definitely were that for me.’
Wolfcub Productions and the Lemonade Blueprint
Keoghan is clear about what he wants Wolfcub to become. The template, he says, is companies like Element Pictures, Lucky Chap, A24 and Neon, outfits with a broad range of filmmakers and writers, and a willingness to back new voices. ‘I want a space for new filmmakers, first time filmmakers, people with a voice and that want to say something,’ he said. Lemonade is the kind of project that fits: a first-time narrative feature from a director he believed in, on a subject that mattered to him personally.
Working with Brophy on set gave him something he didn’t expect: the experience of watching a young actor make choices that weren’t predictable or trained. He drew a comparison to observing Mark Rylance on set. ‘It does inspire me massively to see actors and actresses make choices from places that it just leaves you wondering,’ he said.
The Beatles Films and the Ringo Question
Keoghan was absent from TIFF for Lemonade’s premiere because he is currently in production on the Sam Mendes Beatles film series. He was playfully evasive when pressed on which Beatle he plays, responding ‘Do you, though?’ when told everyone already knew it was Ringo. But Deadline has confirmed that Keoghan will play Ringo Starr, with the drummer himself having confirmed the casting.
According to Variety, all four films in the series are set for an April 2028 release by Sony Pictures, with each film told from the perspective of a different band member. Keoghan described the production as something he doesn’t want to end. ‘It’s an experience that I wish and don’t want to end,’ he said, citing the chance to work alongside director Mendes and cinematographer Greig Fraser, and to shoot Super 8 material on set. ‘It’s just a playground,’ he said. ‘A playground of watching the master classes across the board in every department.’
For now, the Barry Keoghan Lemonade foster care project stands as something distinct from everything else in his career: a film he shaped from the inside, built on memory rather than invention, and put his own production company behind. With four Beatles biopics on the horizon for April 2028, he’ll have plenty of time to think about what Wolfcub takes on next.
