What Barry Keoghan Really Slurped During The Saltburn Bathtub Scene

Anyone who's seen writer-director Emerald Fennell's sophomore film "Saltburn" knows about that bathtub scene. So what were the logistics of filming it — and what did star Barry Keoghan actually drink?

In an interview with Business Insider, the movie's production designer, Suzie Davies, detailed what Keoghan actually consumed to shoot this absolutely bizarre scene ... and also revealed that the actor dove in headfirst, so to speak. For some context, here's what happens: after the object of Oliver's (Keoghan) psychosexual affection, Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), pleasures himself in their shared bathroom, he drains the tub he was just using — at which point Oliver slips into the room and drinks the dregs of Felix's bathwater.

So how did the bathwater look so, uh, realistic? According to Davies, they created a mixture of "yogurt and a bit of milk and some water" for Keoghan to drink. Not just that, but Davies said Keoghan really committed to the moment. "He did it four times and really went for it," Davies recalled. "Every one he did was a different kind of slurp."

Davies also recounted how film sets are, naturally, pretty crowded, but Keoghan shocked everyone into complete silence. "Often, when you film things like that, there are 20 people in the room. It's quite tense. But the cast can bring something that's so extraordinary that you can hear a pin drop. So when Barry was doing his stuff, it was amazing. He had no inhibitions."

Now that fans know precisely what Barry Keoghan imbibed from that bathtub, let's turn our collective attention to the bathtub itself — because creating it was far more complicated than a typical viewer would imagine. The movie was largely shot at an expansive English estate called Drayton House, which boasts 127 rooms and spans 200 acres (and was built around 1300 to boot), but according to Suzie Davies, there wasn't a bathroom that fit Emerald Fennell's specifications for the scene — so they created one.

"It was a spare bedroom with tapestry on the walls and a cream color," Davies explained. "We pulled out the bedroom, and I put the tiles on the floor. We put the bathtub there. We found that wallpaper that looks like muscles. We painted it high-gloss black. We painted the ceiling, and then we built those two vanity units with all the reflections."

Davies and her team were also faced with a specific challenge regarding the bathtub. Not only did it need to be large enough to comfortably accommodate Jacob Elordi (who is 6 feet, five inches tall), but it couldn't have the weight of a real bathtub, or it would have potentially broken through the mansion's floor. A fiberglass version was built, and Davies says that she chose a mahogany finish to match the overall feel of the rest of the house.

"In fact, we made a couple of bathtubs," she said. "With one, we chopped a hole in the side for the close-up shot of Barry slurping up the water."

The bathtub scene isn't the only one that made waves when audiences experienced "Saltburn." After Felix dies in the estate's massive hedge maze, Oliver remains with the Catton family as they mourn their loss, and to say Oliver takes his mourning really far is certainly an understatement. Suzie Davies noted how deeply Barry Keoghan committed to the bathtub scene, so it's unsurprising (but also pretty wild) that Keoghan actually improvised the movie's other highly transgressive moment — the one where he copulates with Felix's fresh grave.

On the red carpet at this year's Golden Globes, Keoghan told Deadline that he came up with this act in the moment. "I wanted to see what Oliver would do next. I wanted to see what the next level of obsession was." Keoghan said. "And by that [I mean], I just wanted the camera to roll. Not to kind of preempt it or rehearse it and what happened, happened. It was one take, and I think it was right. It moved the story forward."

So if the crew was silent during Keoghan's bathtub scene, how did they react to him making sweet, tender love to a pile of dirt? In a video for Esquire's Explain This series, Keoghan said that he shocked everyone into silence once again: "I think no one spoke for a bit. You know, I had mud all over me as well. There's a lot of crazy things I'd done for that movie." That's one way to put it.

Emerald Fennell is, it must be said, no stranger to controversial scenes. Her debut film, "Promising Young Woman," was extraordinarily divisive when it released in 2020 — and even though it went on to win an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, the movie's finale is hotly contested, to say the least. "Saltburn" has stirred up even more discourse, but Fennell is standing her ground, especially when it comes to that bathtub scene.

"To me, the bathtub is just an incredibly erotic scene," she said while speaking to Time Magazine. "It is all the things that something stirring should be, which is funny and intimate and shocking and revolting and unbelievably sexy."

Fennell then elaborated on her sentiment, saying that Oliver's obsession with Felix has to be strange and disturbing — because her intent was to show a very specific type of obsession. "What I was trying to make with this film was something that felt actually true about the nature of desire," she continued. "For desire to really take you in its grip like it does in this movie, it has to be to a certain degree transgressive. It has to be something you wouldn't necessarily want people to see."

So there you have it: Barry Keoghan slurping up a mixture of dairy and water is there to show just how far desire can push a person. "Saltburn," with all of its unsettling moments, is streaming on Amazon Prime now.