Barry Keoghan on stripping down for ‘Saltburn’ final scene: ‘It felt absolutely right’

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains details about the ending of Saltburn.

Barry Keoghan talks about his triumphant graduation from Emerald Fennell’s Salt burns where he takes off his clothes.

As more and more people discover the film after it became available on Amazon Prime Video, some wonder how the film ended.

In a recent interview, the director said Keoghan Oliver didn’t initially dance around the villa without clothes. Keoghan told it EW In one version of the script, he was “on his way to breakfast, where the waiter served him runny eggs”, which would be a reference to an earlier scene in which he was served runny eggs.

“A walk-through didn’t have that post-coital triumph. “If we all did our jobs right, you’d be on Oliver’s side,” Fennell said in the interview published in November. “You don’t care what he does, you want him to do it. They are both completely rejected and somehow on his side. It’s such a dance with the devil. It’s like, ‘Shit.’ Okay, let’s go.’ And so in the end there had to be a triumph, a post-coital victory, a desecration.”

Instead, the final scene finds Oliver dancing around Saltburn with no clothes on as Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s “Murder on the Dance Floor” plays. When Keoghan had the idea, he didn’t hesitate to take on the challenge.

“It felt really good,” Keoghan said. “It’s property. This is my place. This is the absolute confidence: “I can do what I want in this villa.” I can take off my bare knees and dance around because it’s mine. “Yeah, it was fun.”

Although Keoghan was willing to film the scene, he was initially a little reluctant to actually film the scene.

“At first it was about not wearing any clothes. I’m a little, ehhh,” he recalled. “But after the first shot, I was ready to go. I thought, ‘Let’s go again.’ Let’s go again.’ You kind of forget about it because it creates such a comfortable atmosphere and gives you the freedom to say, “Okay, now it’s about the story.”

Fennell said the scene was shot eleven times and by the seventh take it was “technically perfect” but lacked the “absolute devilish joy” she wanted from Oliver.

“To his credit, Barry made it four more times, until the one that exudes a completely vicious lust for life that you just can’t agree with,” added Fennell.