Emerald Fennell: We needed somebody as enigmatic and sexy as Barry Keoghan

There comes a moment in Saltburn, the hotly anticipated second feature from the writer and director Emerald Fennell, when Barry Keoghan’s Oliver Quick, a rough-hewn scholarship student at Oxford and an unlikely guest at the blue-blooded British estate of the title, makes a horrific error at breakfast: he orders a full English, as one might at a Premier Inn. It’s a faux pas that Nancy Mitford failed to list in her guide to the unspoken rules for being “U”, or upper-class, and “non-U”, but it remains a mortifying moment for the guest from the wrong side of the tracks.

“What’s really fun is the specifics,” says Fennell. “When we went to the house that we filmed in, we asked all the amazing people who worked there about everything. And they would say things like, ‘Oh, you wouldn’t put ketchup in a bowl. It would be in the plastic squeezy bottle on the table – never in a bowl. In that world, there are all kinds of complicated rules designed for someone to slip up on. The minutiae is ultraspecific. So the house down the road is regarded as impossibly arriviste because their family built the house in 1700, not 1400. We all know it’s absurd. It’s mad. We can’t help but feel for Oliver when he gets something wrong. And that’s what the film is about in general. Why do we love these people? Why can’t we stop loving people who don’t care about us?”

The feudal impulse to bow and scrape before the landed classes that has defined British life since Æthelstan the Glorious has been successfully exported through such international hits as Downton Abbey and The Crown. (The latter featured Fennell as the young Camilla Parker Bowles, a role she cannot discuss because of the Sag-Aftra strike.)

“Oh yes,” Fennell says. “The British country house and the aristocracy are our main cultural exports in many ways. Everyone watches Downton Abbey and The Crown. Everyone has seen Gosford Park. There’s a kind of familiarity with the rules of those worlds. Internationally, I think, people are more familiar with the aristocracy than they would have been 30 years ago.”

‘My partner will not give up meeting people for sex. I feel enormous rejection’

---

Ireland’s best restaurants revealed at annual awards

---

Why does Dublin Airport want to demolish North Terminal, an icon of Irish modernist architecture?

---

Several literary and movieverse traditions also underpin Fennell’s social satire. Today, as I meet her in London in advance of the film’s release, she cites The Go-Between and Rebecca as big Gothic influences. Her script, with its heated homoeroticism and class frictions, playfully curtsies before Brideshead Revisited. “All of Waugh’s charters are based on my family, actually,” explains Felix Cattan (Jacob Elordi), the impossibly glamorous, implausibly rich heir at the dark heart of Fennell’s wild disgorgement of Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.

“It wasn’t just Brideshead,” Fennell says. “The reason I love working with genre is because when you take something very, very familiar, then you can append it, and make it feel uncanny and uncomfortable. What’s interesting about this very specific genre is that it is already kind of self-referential. Brideshead is directly looking at novels like Jude the Obscure. It’s a subsection that describes The Line of Beauty or the novels of Sarah Waters. It’s a specific British thing: something happened in a country house that none of us could ever forget. That felt like an interesting genre to talk about the very voyeuristic way we’re living in now.”

Felix is the golden boy in the titular domain, a pile inhabited by his hilariously privileged parents (Rosamund Pike and Richard E Grant), damaged sister Venetia (Alison Oliver) and resentful poor cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe).

Keoghan’s Oliver, having been befriended by Felix, initially sticks out like a sore thumb on an estate where rich people play tennis in dinner jackets. Still, the outsider very quickly becomes embedded with the toffs and accustomed to luxury. Oliver’s infatuation with Felix finds torrid expression in – no spoilers – bath time and, well, a particular mound of unearthed soil.

It’s a role that allows Keoghan to find new dimensions within the strangely gormless creepiness he brought to The Killing of a Sacred Deer.

“I think everyone in the film is irreplaceable, but I don’t write with people in mind,” Fennell says. “I’m not really able to do things that way. But, certainly, when we started talking about casting I kind of couldn’t get Barry out of my head. There’s something so particular and so unique about the way that he works. I like saying he’s like a close-up magician: the closer you get, the more complicated and difficult his work is. There’s nothing surface about anything that he does. It’s all deeply felt. That’s really what we needed for Oliver. We needed to have somebody as compelling and as enigmatic and as vulnerable and as sexy as Barry is.”

Part of the dark fun of Saltburn is its period setting. Oliver’s life-changing summer unfolds in 2006, against a backdrop of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and the Cheeky Girls. Wealthy guests, known collectively as “the Henrys”, massacre Flo Rida’s Low at karaoke. The Catton clan assembles in silk pyjamas to watch the hit Japanese horror film Ring. The Catton matriarch complains that Jarvis Cocker’s interpretation of her in the lyrics of Common People is inaccurate: “She came from Greece she had a thirst for knowledge? I’ve never wanted to know anything.”

Against these contemporaneous markers, the nightly black-tie dinners and the many ancient portraits of “dead rellies” speak to centuries of tradition and obscene wealth.

“These worlds are kind of timeless, and that applies as much to Oxford as it does to Saltburn,” says Fennell, who read English at Oxford. “These kind of places that actually just exist. They are the power centre – and that includes the family – and everyone else is part of the surroundings. It was important to me, as a genre fanatic, that the story starts with somebody looking back over their life or over a time in their life. Like ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again’,” – she is quoting the opening line of Rebecca – “I’m here to tell you about something that essentially destroyed my life. That necessitated setting the film in the recent past. And it was humanising to have all of these characters wearing bad clothes and dodgy make-up and fake tan, embarrassing tattoos and Live Strong bracelets. It gives that feeling of specificity. There’s something wonderful about them or watching the Ring that wouldn’t quite hit the same way if they were watching Succession.”

It has been a remarkable few years for Fennell, who was nominated for two Emmy Awards in 2019, as the showrunner for the spy series Killing Eve, and for a third for her depiction of Camilla Parker Bowles on The Crown in 2021.

In 2020 she won the Academy Award for best original screenplay and became the first British woman to be nominated for the best-director Oscar, for her feature debut, Promising Young Woman. This year she appeared in the $1.4-billion-grossing Barbie as the ever-pregnant Midge. For Fennell, who shot Albert Nobbs in Ireland as long ago as 2011, it hasn’t felt anything like an overnight success.

“It looks like it happened fast because it gathered speed, I suppose,” the writer-director says. “But, you know, I’d written and had developed probably a dozen scripts. I published three books. I’ve worked as an actress for years. And an old friend” – Phoebe Waller-Bridge – “read my most recent book and asked me to write on Drifters and then on Killing Eve. Given how independent Promising Young Woman was, no one anticipated how huge it would become. But that’s the work. You try everything until something happens.”

She remains committed to developing her own genre-bending projects over prestige or pay-cheque gigs. “I said quite early on to my manager: please don’t send me anything because everything is so amazing and from people that are amazing. And I can’t know about it because I’ll say yes to all of it and I won’t be able to do the next thing.”

We can’t wait for that next thing.

Saltburn opens in cinemas on Friday, November 17th