If Barry Keoghan wasn’t already the truth and the moment prior to his long-overdue starring turn in Saltburn, he certainly is now, having jumped into the deceptively sinister Oliver Quick with two feet off the back of an Academy Award nomination earlier last year.
And now, with the wider world having become acquainted with Oliver’s stomach-churning antics thanks to Saltburn‘s Prime Video release, the man behind the mercurial protagonist has offered a bit of perspective on the “why” behind some of Oliver’s depravity.
Speaking to GQ, Keoghan explained the state of mind that Oliver was occupying during the bathtub scene, in which Oliver drinks Felix’s semen-infused bathwater, which took the internet by storm.
The bathtub scene is he’s submitting to this obsession and trying to figure out what it is he’s chasing. It’s almost like a sacrifice in how he lowers himself into the bath, physically. And when he gets down there, he’s just confused and helpless and sick, you know, to do that.
What makes this particular insight so interesting—beyond the fact that no one knows Oliver better than Keoghan—is that it speaks to the film’s chief artistic idiosyncrasy of being about nothing. At the risk of oversimplifying, the source of Oliver’s obsession with Felix and his family is by and large unclear, and on top of that, the family itself actually has very little in the way of substance to chase in the first place.
Normally, these two precedents would result in a largely toothless plot that drags the film down beyond repair, and that’s precisely what would have happened if Saltburn had been in the hands of a lesser filmmaker. But Emerald Fennell’s approach was dripping with intention throughout, and the result we got was a masterfully presented piece that somehow understood how to make that same creaky plot work to its advantage, and Keoghan’s leading performance was perhaps the uncontested catalyst of it all.
Saltburn is available to stream on Prime Video.
(featured image: Amazon MGM Studios)
