I Genuinely Can't Watch "Saltburn" The Same After Learning These 13 Surprising Facts
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If there's one film it seems as if everybody just can't stop talking about, it's Saltburn.
The movie was directed by Emerald Fennell, whose previous film was the Oscar winner Promising Young Woman in 2020. Saltburn follows Oliver (Barry Keoghan) as he enters into his classmate Felix's (Jacob Elordi) ostentatious and ultra-wealthy aristocratic home life during one mid-aughts summer at the English countryside estate of Felix's family.
Saltburn, which was released in theaters in November, is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video, and more people than ever are witness to the film's shocking scenes and impressive performances.
So whether you've just seen the film or can't stop thinking about it months later, here are 13 fascinating facts about Saltburn that might just surprise you more than the movie itself:
🚨 Warning: This post contains major spoilers. 🚨
1.Margot Robbie produced Saltburn.
LuckyChap Entertainment, the production company Margot founded alongside her husband, Tom Ackerley, and Josey McNamara, produced two of the year's most notable films: Saltburn and Barbie. They also previously produced Promising Young Woman.
"We shot Barbie and Saltburn at the same time, so Margot had two weeks off [after Barbie] and then came to the set," McNamara told Variety. "I don’t think many other people do that."
2.Carey Mulligan asked to play Poor Dear Pamela.
Emerald told Time that she didn't write the character for the actor, who previously starred in Promising Young Woman. "She read the script as my friend and asked if she could play Poor Dear Pamela," Emerald told the publication. "It needed somebody who would take her seriously. You know, because she is very important, Poor Dear Pamela. She's the human debris."
3.Emerald Fennell attended Oxford University in real life.
In the film, Oliver and Felix meet as students at the prestigious university. "I mean, the vomit in the sink is really down to the last chunk, personally inspired. I think it's all kind of in there, isn't it?" Emerald previously told BuzzFeed. "The thing that I like to do is take these timeless places like the Saltburn country house or Oxford, which always seem so timeless and posh, but the actual experience of being there is that everyone's room is disgusting, everything smells weird, and everyone's wearing a Juicy Couture tracksuit. I was there in 2006, 2007, which is when this film was set. So it was incredibly fun to be able to kind of get the sticky floor down to the perfect consistency."
4.While filming, Rosamund Pike lived in the English estate where they shot the movie.
"It’s amazing that you could just be living in the same house as another family and never see them. They’ve got beautiful gardens that I could get lost in and go and read. I mean, I wouldn’t tell Elspeth I was reading a book — I don’t think Elspeth has ever read a book in her life. I think there are not enough pictures. I think she likes magazines," Rosamund, who played Elspeth, Felix's mother, told the Hollywood Reporter. "But me, Rosamund, would definitely go into the gardens and lie in the grass and read books."
5.Several scenes weren't in the original script, including Farleigh (Archie Madekwe) and Oliver's bedroom scene and their A Midsummer Night's Dream party conversation.
"That scene actually kind of came probably a week before we shot it," Archie told Collider of the party conversation. "I'm sure Emerald was working on it for a long time before that, but it was so needed. It was so needed for Farleigh to kind of gratify himself and say his piece, the thing that he'd been holding on to with these scornful looks the entire film. He just needed to get it out of him and purge himself of it. It was the most fun, collaborative experience I’ve ever had. So great."
6."Mr. Brightside" by the Killers was the most expensive song to license for the film.
"It was the most expensive cue in this movie by miles, but it’s really important, and you can’t even hear it," Emerald told Awards Watch.
7.Barry Keoghan created five different versions of Oliver while filming and had a different notebook for each.
"I wanted his demeanor, his pace, his physicality to change. I wanted this evolution to happen, and I wanted to be on top of that, you know, especially with someone like Oliver, whose demeanor does change, and his motives do change. As the story goes on, each notebook had a different tone of voice," Barry told Vogue. "I don’t know if that came across. At the start, he’s quite innocent and sweet, and then, obviously, we know what happens towards the end. But I wanted to find that middle place where it’s dissected. I wanted each thing to be different."
8.Jacob Elordi prepared to play Elvis Presley in Priscilla during his downtime while shooting Saltburn.
"I made Priscilla three weeks after Saltburn. So they’re strangely both meshed together in my head because I’d shoot all day in London, and then I’d go home to my Elvis cave, which was my hotel room, which was sort of all pictures of Priscilla," Jacob told Vanity Fair.
9.The film intentionally doesn't show Elspeth's immediate reaction to seeing Felix dead.
"One of the things [Emerald] said when Elspeth discovers Felix [dead] in the maze was, 'I’ll never show that. You can never see a mother’s grief on film. It’s just too awful. It’s too much,'" Rosamund told Deadline. "So by the time we hear Elspeth, and by the time the others come in, she’s already battened down the hatches and buried the feelings, immediately overridden it and suppressed it. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t have to play it [off camera]."
10.Barry Keoghan improvised that nude gravesite scene.
"The gravesite was sort of like a collaboration with me and Emerald,” Barry told Variety. “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.”
11.Rosamund Pike shot those bedridden scenes herself.
"It was completely me," she told the Hollywood Reporter when asked if she used a body double for the scenes. "I was absolutely there for two days of Barry doing what he will. I was trying to be a very active acting partner for him. I was trying to respond with my kind of disturbing breath in a way that he would feel like he had an active participant in that scene. If you’re ever a comatose body in a scene, I think it’s your duty to be there for the other actor."
12.The nude dancing scene at the end begins in the King's Bedroom, which was the final room Felix showed Oliver on his initial tour of the estate.
“We’re given a tour of the most beautiful house in England, and we don’t see the house, we see [Felix]. He shows [Oliver] the staterooms first, and it ends in the King’s Bedroom, where the last scene begins, and obviously, [Oliver has] been sleeping there. This is where he lives. It’s an act of marking his territory,” Emerald told Variety. “It’s his place now, and he can do whatever the fuck he wants.”
13.And, finally, that same nude dancing sequence took 11 takes to perfect.
"A lot of the time, [Barry] was immensely patient because there was a lot of naked dancing. Take number 7 was technically perfect," Emerald told Variety. "You could hear everyone’s overjoyed response, but I had to say ‘sorry’ because it was missing whatever it was that made Oliver that slightly human messiness. So we had to do it a further four times.”
