Barry Keoghan's Full Frontal Nudity in Saltburn Is 'Earned,' Says Director: 'Doesn't Feel Gratuitous (Exclusive)

Barry Keoghan bares it all in Saltburn — which writer-director Emerald Fennell says is entirely by design. 

“When it comes to nudity, I'm very, very thoughtful — I hope,” says the Oscar-winning Promising Young Woman filmmaker, 38. “It's very important to me that it doesn't feel gratuitous, that it is always earned.” 

That goes for nudity in any film, she adds. “Whether it's people having breakfast or whether it's a nude dance, why is it in the movie? What is it telling us? What response does it give us?”

For Keoghan, who plays enigmatic protagonist Oliver, a dance sequence in the buff is just one of many wild scenes in this “beautifully wicked tale of privilege and desire,” per its official logline. It was a task the 31-year-old actor was all too willing to take on, says Fennell. 

“There are moments in this movie, where the joy and the terror and the amazingness is knowing you are going to go somewhere that is so unbelievable,” she explains. “Barry, that's what he's interested in. For him, that's the joy.”

Stripping for the camera, she adds, was “not about bravery” for Keoghan. Rather, “it's about the connection” between Oliver, the story’s shocking twists and the audience. 

“We really only see him in the moments when he's not clothed, or rather where he's doing something where he's solitary and we are very, very close and we are seeing him at his most human,” says Fennell of her character. “He is such an enigmatic person. He's necessarily unpindownable — even to himself, I think.”

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Led by Keoghan, the ensemble of Saltburn includes Jacob Elordi, Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant, Archie Madekwe, Alison Oliver and Carey Mulligan. Fennell calls her team collectively “the most committed crew and cast I've ever seen and worked with” and “so f---ing amazing and talented and determined.”

Nude scenes or intimacy coordination, continues Fennell, is all about “enthusiastic consent” from all involved. “About the fact that we, all of us, only do anything because we really, really profoundly believe in it… It's interesting how the framing of these questions a lot of the time is like, ‘How did you make Barry do this?’ Or, ‘How did you get Barry to…’ And I'm just like, ‘There is no such thing.’ It's like asking, ‘How did I get somebody into bed?’ It's not the way that works.”

In filming Saltburn’s trickiest scenes, she says, “We're together making the stickiest, most beautiful, complicated thing. We are all in that together, and [if] anyone, at any point, changes their mind about that, that is absolutely fine. It's like anything — it's got to be beautiful and it's got to be mutual.”

Notably, full-frontal nudity is not featured in the scenes that required an intimacy coordinator. “You never really see below the shoulder blades,” explains Fennell. “And they are some of the most erotic, devastating, disquieting sex scenes that we can see. Because they're so intimate and yet we see nothing.”

She adds, “The nudity in this movie is not about sex — or if it is, it's not just about sex. It's about grief or loss or futility or triumph, solitude, joy.”

That’s why Keoghan and his costars’ commitment to those emotions first and foremost is “something that I'm so grateful for,” Fennell says. “He's just incredible, and I think it's the same for every actor in this movie.”

Of her connection with them, she adds with a grin, “It's a chemistry thing and it's an honesty thing. I like to be really honest, to the extent that I'm acknowledging that I'm also a liar, like all of us… We are all of us engaged in a certain amount of deception, self-deception. We are all kind of Olivers.”

Saltburn is in select theaters now.