'Saltburn' Stars Spill On The Film's Wildly Explicit & Full Frontal Scenes

Audiences are in for a titillating, challenging, and — well, fluid-forward experience with Oscar-winning filmmaker Emerald Fennell’s latest psychological thriller, Saltburn.

Naturally, there were questions for the cast about what filming a movie this wild was like — what with the naked dance numbers, grave humping, oh, and a bathtub scene that is about to break gay Twitter.

Reflecting on the film at its Los Angeles premiere, Fennell told Variety, “It gets under your skin. We just want to make something that makes people feel something. I want to make stuff that you go and sit in a dark room full of strangers and you don’t know what you’re going to feel, and you don’t know where you’re going to be probed. And everyone has a different take on it."

Regarding audience reactions, she noted, "Some people are screaming, some people are squealing. Some people are turned on, some are freaked out and some are furious. Some people don’t really care. What you want is for people to spill out into the street and want to go and have a drink and talk about it.”

The movie stars Barry Keoghan, a university student in mid-2000s England who winds up becoming dangerously fixated on his aristocratic classmate played by Jacob Elordi after he is invited to spend some time away with him at his sprawling estate, Saltburn.

Once there things take a turn for the obsessive, and erotic. One particularly explicit scene involves Keoghan watching Elordi masturbate in a bathtub, followed by Keoghan licking up semen around the tub’s drain. Elordi told Variety, “I was like, ‘Thank God, it’s mine.’ I was very proud. I was very proud to have Barry Keoghan guzzling it like that.”

To that, Keoghan jokingly responded, “He doesn’t text me back or ring me back. It’s so weird. He’s pretending to like me. It’s weird, man.”

Throughout the film, Keoghan strips down including a scene where he humps the ground of a cemetery plot. “The gravesite was sort of like a collaboration with me and Emerald,” Keoghan explained. “On the day, I was like, ‘Can I try something?’ I wanted to see what the next level of obsession was. So I asked for a closed set. I wanted to see where it went. It could have gone completely wrong but I think it moved the story.”

Fennell justified these intense scenes, stating, “If you’re taken over with grief and horror and love and sadness, people do crazy things. And that’s what this film is about.”

Saltburn is currently in limited release and opens wide on November 22. Watch the trailer below.