‘Saltburn’ star Barry Keoghan on his ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ role in Emerald Fennell’s shocking new film [Exclusive Video Interview]
Barry Keoghan has played a superhero and a supervillain, worked with Academy Award-nominated filmmakers like Christopher Nolan and Yorgos Lanthimos, and won global acclaim for his Oscar-nominated role in last year’s “The Banshees of Inishirin.” But none of his previous films presented Keoghan with the challenge and opportunity of leading “Saltburn.” The new film from Oscar winner Emerald Fennell stars Keoghan as Oliver Quick, an Oxford student whose obsession with an excessively wealthy classmate (Jacob Elordi) and the boy’s family has dire consequences.
“When I first read the script, I was amazed at just the different ranges and different layers of Oliver and how much I had to play with,” Keoghan tells Gold Derby in an exclusive video interview. “That really excited me the most, how much I could dig my teeth into him. I was like, ‘This is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of role.’”
Set in the mid-2000s, “Saltburn” is a drama about class, compulsion, and revulsion – think Evelyn Waugh by way of “Cruel Intentions,” a film recently cited by Fennell as one of her favorites. Oliver is the central, often inscrutable figure – an audience surrogate, of sorts, whose motives and behaviors are constantly changing as the film barrels toward its surprise conclusion. Along the way, Fennell and Keoghan push viewers with numerous shocking sequences, including one part where Oliver expresses his grief by attempting to have sex with a fresh grave.
Keoghan says in the script, that moment wasn’t as elaborate or physically demanding as it appears in the finished film. “I felt I needed something more, and I felt I needed something that I couldn’t put my finger on,” he says. After spending some time thinking about the sequence, Keoghan says he asked Fennell if she could close the set to “just see where my body takes me.”
“I just felt Oliver thought that was the right thing to do,” Keoghan says of the scene. “But it didn’t really fulfill him and he’s just broken. He’s just really confused. It’s tragic. You know, he’s in love, or he thinks he’s in love or, I don’t know.”
Fennell – an Oscar winner for her debut feature, “Promising Young Woman” – has said she wrote Olivier with Keoghan in mind after seeing him in “Killing of a Sacred Deer.” And the trust she put into Keoghan as a performer to carry such a complicated project was reciprocal, he says.
“She just totally gets me. We were in sync all the time,” Keoghan explains. “We chatted a lot about the character and motives. And if I had a question, I’d bring it to her and she was fully there for me. She kind of gave me a license to be – I wouldn’t say silly, but, you know, as an actor, you want that license to try something. Because I feel like we’ve not seen a lot of performances, because they may not have had the chance to try something because they’re not comfortable. But with me, I felt totally comfortable with Emerald that I could try something and it may work 100 percent or may not work. But to have that trust and to be allowed to do that is every actor’s dream, you know?”
“Saltburn” is in theaters now and streams on Amazon Prime Video beginning on December 22.
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