Barry Keoghan Reveals Secrets Behind Saltburn's Big Naked Dance

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Saltburn.

Barry Keoghan and Jacob Elordi’s new movie Saltburn is causing quite a stir, especially due to it’s big finale.

The Oscar-hopeful movie Saltburn begins with the seemingly lonely, lower-class, and quiet Oliver (Keoghan) getting invited to the expansive Saltburn estate of a wealthy classmate he becomes enamored and obsessed with (Elordi).

As he gets deeper into the world of his new friend Felix and his rich, eccentric family, Oliver’s true nature comes out and he starts to manipulate and lie his way into the good graces of the wealthy and powerful family.

By the end of the movie, he’s dispatched with several members of the family in various ways, tricked his way into the hearts of the parents, and made himself the heir to the Saltburn estate. As the film ends, Oliver dances naked through the estate to Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s “Murder on the Dancefloor.”

It’s a stunning end to a twisted movie, but it almost didn’t happen.

According to Keoghan and writer/director Emerald Fennell, the movie originally had a much tamer ending that featured Oliver walking through the estate to a breakfast table where the butler served him a breakfast of runny eggs in a callback to an earlier scene.

"A walkthrough didn't have that post-coital triumph. If we all did our job correctly, you are on Oliver's side," Fennell told EW. "You don't care what he does, you want him to do it. You are both completely repulsed and sort of on his side. It's that kind of dance with the devil. It's like, 'F---. Okay, let's go.' And so at the end, it needed to have a triumph, a post-coital win, a desecration."

"It totally felt right." Keoghan added, "It's ownership. This is my place. It's full confidence in, 'I can do what I want in this manor. I can strip to my barest and waltz around because this is mine.' Yeah... it was fun."

Although he found the experience fun, Keoghan admitted that at first he was nervous to do the nude scene.

“The initial thing was about me having no clothes on. I’m a bit, ehhh,” he said. “But after one, I was ready to go. I was like, ‘Let’s go again. Let’s go again.’ You kind of forget because there’s such a comfortable environment created, and it gives you that license to go, ‘All right, this is about the story now.”

"I didn't know I could dance like that, by the way. I was like, 'Wow. Where did them things come from?' Do ya know what I mean?,” Keoghan added with a smile.

Saltburn is currently playing in select theaters before expanding nationwide November 22.