If we weren’t already looking forward to the queer psychosexual thriller Saltburn, a newly released shirtless photo of star Jacob Elordi would have us chomping at the bit to see it.
The still from the film, released by Entertainment Weekly, shows Elordi’s character Felix Catton lounging in tiny swim shorts — and nothing else! — on a rattan chair while reading Harry Potter with a popsicle in hand. (Oh, to be that popsicle!)
Although it’s hard to look at anything but Elordi, the new image also shows a fascinating assortment of discarded objects that may give us a window into his character. Pringles tubes and Coke cans litter the ground at his feet, where we also find a tennis racket, a wine glass and, interestingly, a pair of binoculars.
Set in the mid-2000s, Barry Keoghan (The Banshees of Inisherin) plays an Oxford student named Oliver Quick who meets the aristocratic and popular Felix, who invites him to the titular Saltburn, "his eccentric family’s sprawling estate,” There Oliver meets “a twisted bunch of characters who say and do things that will make you squirm,” according to Amazon Studios.
Director Emerald Fennell, whose first feature Promising Young Woman brought home an Oscar, told Entertainment Weekly that she found inspiration for Saltburn in Gothic novels like Dracula where "romance and horror are inextricably linked."
"The question is, who are the vampires in this movie? Everyone's kind of digging in, aren't they?" she said.
The director was also inspired by films about the intersection of power, class, and sex, such as Brideshead Revisited, Atonement, The Servant, Parasite, Kind Hearts and Coronets, and The Handmaiden.
"It is about that intersection, and where watching and being watched and all of that stuff collide," Fennell said. "That all feels really exciting, especially now when we are terminally watching and being watched online outright."
The 37-year-old director said that when Keoghan was handed the script for the "macabre dark comedy" he was all in, even though the film asks a lot of its actors.
"That's the thing with Barry," Fennell explained. "The things in this movie that people expect would've been difficult conversations weren't at all, because he's like me. We just want to do anything to make something real and profound and destabilizing."
Saltburn is set to premiere in select theaters November 24. Watch the trailer below.
