Barry Keoghan Revealed If He Was Wearing A Prosthetic In Saltburn
The answer to the real question you were asking.
Love it or hate it, Saltburn is a movie that you’ll never forget once you watch it. The dark thriller is packed with some of the most jaw-dropping moments to ever be on the big screen, and they all center on Barry Keoghan’s kinky social-climber Oliver. Just when you thought nothing could top Oliver’s vampiric seductions or that bathtub scene, the film’s final shot showed Oliver in a whole new light. And now, Keoghan is dropping the truth about that revealing scene.
Spoiler alert: Don’t read on if you haven’t seen Saltburn. After all of Oliver’s manipulative machinations are finally revealed, Saltburn ends with the mansion’s new owner joyously dancing around his property butt-naked. It’s an act of uninhibited, devilish glee, as Oliver finally lays claim to what he’s really been after all along.
And yes — viewers see all of Oliver in the extended dance number. While most actors wear a prosthetic for full-frontal scenes, Keoghan actually threw his whole body into that final moment, revealing to Entertainment Weekly that he really was baring it all.
“The initial thing was about me having no clothes on. I’m a bit, ehhh,” Keoghan said, recalling his initial hesitancy with the nudity. “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.’”
The actor explained how once he fully understood what the scene was saying, he had fun performing it.
“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.”
The “Murder on the Dancefloor” routine feels like the perfect ending to Oliver’s twisted saga, but it actually wasn’t originally Saltburn’s closing scene. Keoghan recalled how the movie initially ended with Oliver sitting down to breakfast in his new manor, only to be served the same runny eggs that he had sent back to the kitchen when he first arrived.
It would’ve been a moment of small comeuppance, signaling that Oliver still can’t grasp the heights of privilege he so longs for. But instead, director Emerald Fennell wanted to end her tale by fully celebrating Oliver with a moment evoking “post-coital triumph.”
“If we all did our job correctly, you are on Oliver's side,” Fennell told EW. “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*ck. Okay, let's go.’ And so at the end, it needed to have a triumph, a post-coital win, a desecration.”
