SPOILER ALERT: This article contains details on Saltburn‘s ending.
Barry Keoghan is opening up about the triumphant ending he has in Emerald Fennell‘s Saltburn that has him stripping away his clothes.
With more people discovering the film after it was made available on Amazon’s Prime Video, some are wondering how the film’s ending came to be.
In a recent interview, the director said that initially, the ending didn’t have Keoghan Oliver dancing through the manor with no clothes on. Keoghan told EW that a version of the script had him “on his way to breakfast, where he is served runny eggs by the butler,” which would’ve been a callback to an earlier scene where he is served runny eggs.
“A walkthrough didn’t have that post-coital triumph. If we all did our job correctly, you are 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. 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.”
Instead, the final scene features Oliver dancing around Saltburn with no clothes as Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s “Murder on the Dance Floor” plays. When presented with the idea, Keoghan didn’t hesitate to take on the challenge.
“It totally felt right,” Keoghan said. “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.”
Although Keoghan was game for the scene, once it came to actually filming it, he had some hesitation at first.
“The initial thing was about me having no clothes on. I’m a bit, ehhh,” he recalled. “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.’”
Fennell said the shot the scene 11 times and by the seventh take, it was “technically perfect” but didn’t have the “absolutely devilish joy” she wanted out of Oliver.
“Barry, to his credit, did it four more times until the one that you see, which has this total f***ing evil joie de vivre that is impossible not to be on board with,” Fennell added.
