All of the above are in evidence as Saltburn opens during Freshers Week 2006, when the majority of the bright young things “going up” to Oxford were equipped not just with three As but the peculiar confidence engendered by a multipage family entry in Debrett’s. Adrift in this sea of toffs is Oliver, a state-school alumnus from Prescot, played by Barry Keoghan with the same implacable mix of eeriness and vulnerability that he brought to the role of Dominic Kearney in The Banshees of Inisherin. Oliver’s social life raft finally appears in the self-inflated form of Felix (Jacob Elordi)—son and heir of the prominent Catton family—who takes him under his blue-blooded wing and, eventually, back to Saltburn, his ancestral seat, for the holidays. As the golden days of summer wear on, Oliver begins to question what—and whom—he would be willing to sacrifice to live an ivory tower existence alongside Felix’s family indefinitely. What follows combines the stunning scenery of a Merchant Ivory film with all the dark thrills of The Talented Mr. Ripley.
Keoghan and Elordi aside, it’s a heavenly cast. There’s Lord Catton (Richard E. Grant), a “land-rich and cash-bulging boy-man,” according to Grant; Lady Catton (Rosamund Pike), an ex-model who “can’t stand ugliness”; Felix’s sister Venetia (Alison Oliver), a third-generation Sloane Ranger with a DIY St. Tropez fake tan and an eating disorder; and New York-raised cousin Farleigh, who, as Archie Madekwe puts it, is always having to sing (and dress) for his supper in this strange world where people “wear tuxedos to play lawn tennis and watch The Ring in custom silk pajamas”.
“I wanted to make something sexy. I wanted to make something about boys. And I wanted to make something that felt very different to the last thing I made,” Fennell tells me. “And, honestly, my favorite genre slash subgenre of anything is: something happens in a country house one summer.”
A few months earlier, a restless Jacob Elordi and I are fleeing the lights, cameras, and microphones of a Vogue set in Oxfordshire’s Shotover Country Park and cutting along a path in the house’s damp, fragrant grounds, where a teenage Princess Anne once broke her nose after falling off a horse. For an Australian best known for playing Euphoria’s Nate Jacobs—the Dixie Cup-clutching, Ram 1500-driving personification of toxic American masculinity—he makes quite a convincing English gentleman, I point out. He laughs, noting that Felix may be a more “subtle” manifestation of patriarchal values, but, in many ways, he’s even “scarier” than Nate, not least because he thinks he owns “well, everything.”
Photo: Courtesy of Prime
The challenge of the role, for Elordi, was getting into the radically entitled mindset of: “I [genuinely] don’t need to prove anything [to anyone].” Despite having a face that launched a thousand fansites and the role of Elvis Presley in Sofia Coppola’s forthcoming Priscilla, at 26, the Brisbane native still worries that someone might just “take it [all] away”—something that Felix, with the privilege of primogeniture, has never had to consider. So Elordi took off into the California desert alone for a fortnight to practice swallowing syllables (“they don’t even have to enunciate”) and feeling within his rights to “occupy as much space as possible.” Reading Evelyn Waugh, “a real treat,” was helpful, as was spending a month in Chelsea before filming, where he learned that people in SW3 do indeed drink Pimm’s and use the word “lush” without any trace of irony. “I was like, there’s no way people behave like this, and then…”
