Ants. Timber wolves. House cats, if he doesn’t move around too much. There are literally millions of things in the world that want to eat Barry Keoghan’s arm. 

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But in the days leading up to filming Martin McDonaghs’s The Banshees of Inisherin, a living thing got closer to consuming the Saltburn star’s delectable limb flesh than anyone else ever has, at least to the best of the public’s ability to ascertain. The prognosis was grim. Survival was not guaranteed. Worst case scenario, the world was staring down the barrel of a future without any more Eternals movies.

Barry Keoghan and the no good, very bad flesh-eating disease

Keoghan, who is now as solidly out of the woods re: getting his arm eaten as anyone can hope to be, came down with a bad case of flesh-eating bacteria, also known by the decidedly Harry Potter spell-sounding scientific name “necrotizing fasciitis.” 

Necrotizing fasciitis is rare – the CDC clocks around a thousand cases in the U.S. per year, putting your odds of getting it around the same as getting taken to the abandoned amusement park where Mark Wahlberg hunts the most dangerous game. And like being disappeared into the funhouse at Parky Park, things get serious very quickly.

The opening volley of symptoms is treacherously generic, and includes tenderness, redness, and swelling at the infection site. Per the CDC: 

“Within 24 to 48 hours, the overlying skin may turn dusky, indicating small vessels in the dermal papilla have thrombosed. (…) Bullae form and are filled with straw colored fluid that progressively turns to hemorrhagic fluid.”

Wildly, things don’t get better after “hemorrhagic fluid.” Immediate, dramatic measures have to be taken after diagnosis, including a smorgasbord of antibiotics and pretty good odds of exploratory surgery. Amputations are common. Even with the miracles of modern science on our side, mortality rates sit in the 10 to 20% range – as high as 33% if the patient lucks into streptococcal toxic shock syndrome. 

Luckily for fans of extra-lumpy movie Jokers, Keoghan was fine, walking away with a few scars on his right arm after scaring the writer and director of Three Billboards to death by calling in sick with flesh-eating bacteria a few days before shooting. The whole story is detailed in the actor’s recent GQ profile, which also features a picture of him with a pigeon on his arm, because apparently he’s the kind of guy who gets one mortality-threatening infection and keeps chasing that rush for the rest of his life.