This much I know: Garrett Keogh

FOR an actor, every new part is both a challenge and an opportunity, and the most important journey that you will ever undertake.

My latest role is in Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer where I play Richard, a Dub, fond of a jar, who recently went blind. Although he’s a mess I imagine him as an unexpected force for good in the whole shebang — as if out of the dungheap of humanity a flower will grow. Via a circuitous path he allows his brother to confront his demons and this fact of brotherly love coincides with the birth of the new light of Christmas. We are taking it on tour around the country.

I became an actor quite by accident. An uncle showed me an ad in the paper for the Abbey Theatre School of Acting, and said ‘you’d be good at that’. Many years later when it had become my profession it emerged that my mother had put him up to it. I had just finished secondary school and she had asked him ‘to do anything that would keep me off the streets that summer’. I didn’t really have a burning ambition to do anything else.