Barry Keoghan has addressed his final scene in Saltburn, explaining his initial reservations about having to dance naked around a stately home.
The 31-year-old Irish actor stars in Emerald Fennell’s comedy-thriller as Oliver Quick, a university student who’s invited to spend the summer at the sprawling estate of his ultra-rich classmate Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi).
Warning, Saltburn spoilers to follow
In the final scenes of the film, it’s revealed that all of the Catton family deaths have been expertly premeditated by Oliver, thus leaving him as the sole inheritor of the entire Saltburn estate.
To celebrate his victory, a naked Oliver dances through the halls to Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s “Murder on the Dancefloor”. Discussing the final scene, Keoghan told Entertainment Weekly in a November interview that his initial hesitation when it came time to film “was about me having no clothes on”.
“I’m a bit, ehhh,” he said. “But after take one, I was ready to go. I was like, ‘Let’s go again. Let’s go again.’ You kind of forget, because there’s such a comfortable environment created, and it gives you that license to go, ‘All right, this is about the story now.’”
Keoghan added that the ending “felt totally right”. “It’s ownership. This is my place. It’s full confidence in, ‘I can do what I want in this manor. I can strip to my barest and waltz around because this is mine.’ Yeah… it was fun.”
Barry Keoghan in ‘Saltburn’— (Prime Video)
Fennell revealed that she had written an alternate ending that would’ve seen Oliver “on his way to breakfast, where he is served runny eggs by the butler” – a nod to an earlier scene where Oliver expressed contempt for runny eggs.
“A walkthrough didn’t have that post-coital triumph,” the Promising Young Woman director said. “If we all did our job correctly, you are on Oliver’s side.
“You don’t care what he does, you want him to do it. You are both completely repulsed and sort of on his side. It’s that kind of dance with the devil. It’s like, ‘F***. Okay, let’s go.’ And so at the end, it needed to have a triumph, a post-coital win, a desecration,” Fennell said.
In a separate interview, Ellis-Bextor confessed to People that she “wasn’t quite prepared” to see Keoghan dance nude to her 2001 hit.
“Seeing it written down as a premise is different,” the British singer-songwriter said. “I mean, Barry really went for it. And it’s, like, the whole song!”
Laughing, Ellis-Bextor continued: “I mean, he’s never going to be able to hear that in the same way again. And every time he’s out and that comes on, people are going to think he’s going to strip off!”
The Independent’s chief film critic Clarisse Loughrey described Saltburn “as a class satire [that] reaches no conclusions” in her four-star review of the movie.
“But it’s filled to the brim with darkly funny, bile-slicked revulsion,” she wrote. “For its director, who hails from the same upper classes she targets, it’s an act of self-excavation.”
Saltburn is available to stream on Amazon’s Prime Video.
