Jacob Elordi says some of the shocked reactions to the bathtub scene in Saltburn “shows me just how, I guess, prudish we are”.
Jacob Elordi has blasted viewers’ “prudish” reaction to the Saltburn bathtub scene.
The scene sees Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) drink bathwater after he secretly watched Felix Catton (Elordi) masturbate in the tub, and this moment got people talking – with some being shocked.
Appearing on Entertainment Weekly’s Awardist podcast, Elordi, 28, said: “I actually think it shows me just how, I guess, prudish we are.
“When I watch that, I just think there’s far more extreme things in cinema that I’ve seen, far more graphic.”
The star – who has witnessed “more alarming” moments in films – cannot understand why viewers do not have the same reaction when it comes to scenes packed with distressing violence.
Elordi added: “There’s more alarming things in the top 10 streamed remakes of crime documentaries on every streaming platform.
“I think that’s much more alarming, the kind of horrible joy that we all get from watching children be mutilated. That’s what was interesting to me.
“I was like, ‘Here’s a piece of fiction with something just a little taboo,’ and that makes people’s skin crawl. It’s an interesting parallel.”
Saltburn – which is about Oxford student Oliver becoming obsessed with his rich-and-aristocratic classmate Felix – was directed by Emerald Fennell.
Speaking about the bathtub scene in 2023, Fennell, 40, told Entertainment Weekly: “The bathtub was the first thing, the first image, that came to me.
“It was a boy saying, ‘I wasn’t in love with him,’ and that same boy licking the bottom of a bathtub. So that was the very centre of the film for me, this kind of unreliable narrator, somebody who was clearly in the grips of extreme desire and who hasn’t yet come to terms with it or who has had to find another way of coming to terms with it or explain it.”
And the sequence caused an unusual reaction from Saltburn’s 52-year-old cinematographer Linus Sandgren – whom Fennell describes as “the most profoundly unshockable person” she has ever met.
Fennell said: “The Swedes are famously very … they’ll talk about anything. And when Barry started to rim the drain, Linus squealed like a little girl, and we had to edit it out, and he was like, ‘F***’
“That is the thing – if in the room on the monitor you are all feeling like, ‘Whoa, holy s***,’ then it’s the most exciting thing in the world. Because it’s not just that something’s incredibly sexy, or at least I think it is; it has an involuntary physical response, actually, that even when you are not physically supposed to respond vocally because you’re filming, you do that because it’s something that you can’t help but respond to.
“And it’s those moments where you know that you are getting to something that is incredible.”
Jacob Elordi slams ‘prudish’ reaction to Saltburn bathtub scene
