Barry Keoghan wasn’t afraid to bear it all for “Saltburn.”
During Monday’s episode of “The Louis Theroux Podcast,” the actor was asked about the scene at the end of the 2023 film, where his character, Oliver Quick, dances completely naked.
When Louis Theroux mentioned that people had speculated he had used a “prosthetic penis” or that his body parts had been “enhanced,” Keoghan quickly shut it down.
“Enhanced? Who said that? Nah, wow,” he said quickly.
“It was all me. […] it was a thing that I didn’t really bat an eyelid to, you know, I would bat an eyelid if it didn’t fit the story.”
The scene in question shows Keoghan’s character triumphantly dancing around an estate he’s just inherited while blasting “Murder On The Dance Floor” by Sophie Ellis-Bextor.
The dad of one, 32, then detailed the conversation he had with director Emerald Fennell about the scene where they felt his character needed to show “a bit more ownership” of the space.
“He’s kind of got this mansion at the end, it’s his space. And when you have that space … we all do it at home: we walk around naked, do you know what I mean? Because we’re comfy and this is our environment,” the “Killing of a Sacred Deer” star explained.
Keoghan even saw the scene as a work of art, telling Theroux, “It’s just beautiful to look at that […] but to watch the body of someone run through rooms like that, it’s like a painting almost.”
The actor previously talked about the scene with EW, telling the outlet that it “felt right” to film.
“The initial thing was about me having no clothes on. I’m a bit, ehhh,” Keoghan continued.
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“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.’”
In fact, he was so comfortable that the sequence was filmed 11 times.
“A walkthrough didn’t have that post-coital triumph. If we all did our job correctly, you are on Oliver’s side,” Fennell previously explained.
“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,” she continued. “It’s like, ‘F–k. Okay, let’s go.’ And so at the end, it needed to have a triumph, a post-coital win, a desecration.”
Keoghan previously revealed that the erotic graveyard scene, where his character simulates sex with a grave, was fully improvised as well.
“I wanted to see what Oliver would do next,” Keoghan told Deadline on the red carpet for the 2024 Golden Globes. “I wanted to see what the next level of obsession was.”
“And by that [I mean], I just wanted the camera to roll,” the “Dunkirk” star continued. “Not to kind of preempt it or rehearse it and what happened, happened. It was one take, and I think it was right. It moved the story forward.”
“Saltburn” is available to stream on Amazon Prime.
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