Bafta winner Barry Keoghan takes on his biggest role to date as the enigmatic protagonist of Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn.
The scene Barry Keoghan knew he wanted to get right as Oliver Quick in Saltburn was not that jaw-dropping naked dance at the end of the film, nor the jaw-dropping licking of the bathtub or the jaw-dropping humping of the grave, it was a more contemplative and less showy moment — the morning after the Midsummer Night’s Dream party.
“Oliver just steps out onto that balcony and has this look of despair,” Keoghan says. “He throws a tennis ball into the pond. We’re seeing a real, raw, broken-down boy there. You have to let your shoulders drop, I wanted to look beaten. I wanted to show defeat, and from that point on, he says, ‘I’m going to show you.’”
Writer/director Emerald Fennell offered Keoghan the part before he even read the script — she had been blown away by the young Irish actor’s performance in Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2017 film The Killing Of A Sacred Deer. The actor said yes to Saltburn thanks to Fennell’s passion and vision.
Once he was sent the script, Keoghan said reading it “felt a like a celebration that I get to do this… it was such a proper showcase for an actor, there’s so much required.”
Indeed, Oliver is a particular challenge, and Keoghan’s most substantial lead role to date — following his co-lead in Bart Layton’s American Animals (2018). Oliver proves a fish out of water at Oxford University, telling a sob story about his disadvantaged background to the toffs around him, including Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi). When Felix invites him to his family estate, Saltburn, for the long, hot summer of 2007, Oliver impacts each member of the Catton clan.
Oliver is always the outsider, observing but not quite fitting in. He is also a liar and, by the end of the film, the audience finds out just how deceitful he has been.
“What he does isn’t very nice,” Keoghan says. “But he’s also a feckin’ genius — the way he maps everything out. He’s also a top observer; he’s a bit of an investigator. He’s lost, he’s confused, but he just gets a kick out of watching other humans interacting, learning about their morals and their motives.”
In preparing for the shoot, Keoghan continued a practice he started a few years ago — writing down his character’s traits in Moleskine notebooks. “It was my first [full] lead role and I wanted to have total concentration,” he explains. He filled up five notebooks to understand Oliver. “With Emerald’s script, everything’s there. So I could go away by myself and put the work in and just get into character that way. The beauty of that is you’re in control of creating that character.
“The five notebooks were all about five different Olivers, and each notebook represents a different acceleration for him or a different domain or a different physicality or slight changes in how he looks at someone. So if I had scene 78 or wherever we were in the script, I could revert back to that notebook, so I know what to do where. I wanted those changes in him to be quite noticeable.”
Fennell, making her second feature after the Oscar- and Bafta-winning Promising Young Woman, was the kind of director who gave him the freedom to explore Oliver. “The brilliant thing with Emerald is that I could bring all that back to her — she was a director who gave me the confidence to try it. She gave me that licence to be silly, or to creatively go out there and fail or take it to the next level. That’s all I want, to keep pushing the boundaries, to discover a character with the director.”
He thinks he “takes better direction” from women — “I was raised by women, my granny and my auntie. I think I don’t put up that subconscious guard [with women] and I can show more vulnerability”— and he has relished experiences with the likes of Fennell, Andrea Arnold and Chloe Zhao. But he reassures that he is not avoiding male directors, of course. “Please hire me,” he says with a laugh.
Bonding experience
For Saltburn, the cast and crew stayed at or near the estate in Northamptonshire where the film was shot and Keoghan enjoyed their bonding time together on set. “It was like a big summer camp,” he says. “It was a joy being in that house and roaming around.”
And the house, as well as the actor, are on full display in the now-infamous final dance scene, choreographed by Polly Bennett to Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s ‘Murder On The Dancefloor’. On the day of shooting, he went through the one-take shot 11 times. He was not much concerned about being naked on screen, but was more worried about moving his hips correctly.
“I wanted to get it right,” he says. “I was trying to perfect it because I wanted it to look gorgeous with this naked figure roaming about all those rooms with their grand paintings and drapery. It’s also a thing of him feeling his power that this is his now.”
Keoghan used to be a boxer — a great background for that dance sequence, Fennell says. Other than the dance moves, he did not do any extraordinary physical preparation for Saltburn. He explains that Oliver was not meant to be buff and sexy, and jokes, “no matter how hard you train, you’re not gonna look better than Jacob… But I do tend to stay in shape.”
Released by Amazon MGM Studios in North America and Warner Bros internationally, Saltburn has proved a notable box-office hit in UK/Ireland, grossing $4m (£3.2m) in its first 17 days in the territory. And Keoghan, already amply in demand after his Bafta win and Oscar nomination for Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees Of Inisherin, is trying to keep his same focus on choosing the projects that will move him forward. He would love for the right role to come along that allows him to make a physical transformation as well — inspired by the work of Daniel Day-Lewis, Tom Hardy or Christian Bale.
Keoghan is not ruling out a move into directing one day — although not yet. “I’m learning more and I’m moving more into that filmmaker world. Would my film be any good? I don’t think so but I’d still be up for trying.”
The Irish actor is now spending most of his time in Los Angeles, with his girlfriend and their toddler son Brando, but will go where the parts take him. Since Saltburn wrapped, he has shot Andrea Arnold’s Bird (even living with Arnold for a short while to learn more about the world she was creating), Chris Andrews’ feature debut Bring Them Down (in his native Ireland) and a more secretive, untitled feature with Waves director Trey Edward Shults.
“It sounds so cliché, but I grew up with the Hollywood sign on my bedroom wall, so I want to give it a real shot,” he says of his time in the US. He is certainly not just seeking fame and fortune with bigger films (his credits already include Marvel’s Eternals, Dunkirk and TV’s Chernobyl). “It’s more about how can I get better as an artist and as a person, and learn a little bit about myself.”
No comments yet