BY MARCH 10, we shall know whether Cillian Murphy has become the first Irishman to win the Academy Award for Best Actor since Daniel Day-Lewis in 2012.
Whether or not Murphy succeeds, however, is immaterial. One Irish actor has already achieved the nation’s collective dream this week. We are speaking, of course, about Barry Keoghan, who this week appeared naked in the pre-Oscar’s edition of Vanity Fair.
The appearance by Keoghan is a reference to his nudity in the much-discussed film Saltburn. Keoghan’s nude scene has been so much discussed, in fact, that even Andrew Scott is getting harassed by BBC reporters with insulting questions about Keoghan’s penis.
Despite the inescapable nightmare that is British entertainment reporters during an awards season that prominently features Irish filmmakers, Keoghan’s success is something to be welcomed. Ireland is not often so roundly lauded in the field of nudity.
The one concern is that young Irish men have, in the past, proven themselves especially suggestible when they get a whiff of an icon whose style they can appropriate. The advent of Conor McGregor was ushered in by men with beards, three-piece suits and watches that would send the median Irish earner into overdraft. Similarly, Cillian Murphy’s hairstyle and flat-cap in his role as Tommy Shelby has been aped at home and abroad (though the success of Oppenheimer has failed to revive the porkpie hat in the same vein).
With summer fast approaching, it doesn’t bear thinking about how a population already too eager to take its shirt off will respond to this encouragement to get even more naked.
Coincidentally, a certain cultural confusion towards nudity was already hanging in the air. Last weekend, a Belfast late-bar called The Devenish hosted an evening with a group of dancers called the UK Pleasure Boys.
It’s actually harder to find a Google Image result of the young pleasure men with their shirts on than off, but it still seems that some were surprised when the evening culminated with the UK Pleasure Boys getting naked. Smartphone footage of the incident quickly went viral, horrifying some and amusing others, sparking a brief moral panic that would have felt a bit more timely in the early-2000s.
Presenting the 30th annual #VFHollywood Issue, our cheekiest yet, starring Bradley Cooper, Natalie Portman, Pedro Pascal, Colman Domingo, Jodie Comer, Lily Gladstone, Greta Lee, Charles Melton, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Jenna Ortega, and Barry Keoghan.
UK Pleasure Boys can teach us all a valuable lesson
7
1
24.02.2024
BY MARCH 10, we shall know whether Cillian Murphy has become the first Irishman to win the Academy Award for Best Actor since Daniel Day-Lewis in 2012.
Whether or not Murphy succeeds, however, is immaterial. One Irish actor has already achieved the nation’s collective dream this week. We are speaking, of course, about Barry Keoghan, who this week appeared naked in the pre-Oscar’s edition of Vanity Fair.
The appearance by Keoghan is a reference to his nudity in the much-discussed film Saltburn. Keoghan’s nude scene has been so much discussed, in fact, that even Andrew Scott is getting harassed by BBC reporters with........
© TheJournal
visit website
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Rami G Khouri
Donald Low
Mort Laitner
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
Michael Kwet
