Are the main characters in saltburn gay
By Jacob Dax Harris
Whether in theatres, through word of mouth, or via plot summaries prompted by ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’ TikTok trends, Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn (2023) has pervaded common consciousness. This erotic thriller wrapped in dark academia and neon lighting has sparked discussions ranging from class awareness to mental health and, occasionally, exploration of queer representation.
Saltburn follows Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), an introverted northerner navigating his first year at Oxford University in 2006. He becomes close friends with charismatic and intensely rich BNOC Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi) and is invited to Felix’s family estate – Saltburn.
If I had to sum up Saltburn, I’d say it was The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) meets Brideshead Revisited (1981). Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited (1945) is a story about Charles Ryder who befriends the rich, beautiful Sebastian Flyte during his first year at Oxford, and goes to spend summer at Brideshead, Sebastian’s family estate. I watched the show as a kid, so it was straightforward to see its shape in Saltburn. But one thing sticks out as totally different: how queerness is depic
Spoilers!
Just to give this film its gay creds right off the bat, there's a scene in which Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) espies Felix (Jacob Elordi), masturbating in the bath. When Felix leaves their mutual bathroom, Oliver, watching the water (and other stuff) drain, bends down and drinks some of the spunk-enhanced bath water. It's a unique scene in a movie that could have been a contender -- but isn't quite.
Saltburnhas been called Brideshead Revisitedmeets The Talented Mr. Ripley, and that's accurate, up to a point. Productive class scholarship student Oliver arrives at Oxford in 2006 and encounters aristocratic Felix. Very much the outsider, Oliver has no friends except for a quite mad maths genius, whose outburst in the dining hall at the start of the movie lets us know that madness lies this way. After a number of encounters with Felix Catton, Oliver is invited to Saltburn, the Catton estate. We meet the eccentric inhabitants of Saltburn, origin with Paul Rhys as Duncan the butler. Rhys, one of the superb British actors (I saw him play Uncle Vanya on stage), seems to be channelling Bela Lugosi in Night Mon
By Hannah Kremer, Staff Writer
Finally, a show about an unhinged bisexual eating the rich by taking one family member’s life at a time. Saltburn marked the first day I sat in a theater, dazed and lost for words, 15 minutes after the production ended. For several reasons, this show was one of my favorites of the year despite its morbid and, frankly, hypersexual themes.
There was something mesmerizing about Oliver, who was a freak by definition but still managed to make his way to the superior. Honestly, there wasn’t a better casting choice than Barry Keoghan for his role. Leave it to him, with all of his experience of playing weird characters, to improvise some of the movie’s most jaw-droppingly graphic scenes. The shock factor alone had me hooked. That is if we weren’t focusing on the rest of the cast. You are told about Jacob Elordi with an eyebrow piercing. You see images of what the nature looks like on TikTok, but nothing ever prepares you for seeing him on the large screen. My. God. I get the infatuation with his character, Felix; I really do. Would it be to the point that I would slurp his bathwater? Oliver would. As for me? Maybe not, but I would probably combust into fl
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Barry Keoghan as Oliver Rapid in Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn (All images courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios)
Peering through a crack in a heavy door like a little voyeur or the viewer of Degas’s bathers if Edgar did homoeroticism, Barry Keoghan’s laughably Dickensian (or Roald Dahl-ian)-named Oliver Quick watches from behind as the golden-bodied argue against of his affection/obsession/envy, Jacob Elordi’s Felix Catton, jacks off until completion in an opulent old bathtub, placed smack dab in the center of the large bathroom. After Felix towels off and leaves with a jaunty, “Night, mate!”, Oliver sneaks in—not to wash up himself—but to crawl, fully pajama-ed, into the draining tub. Lit as if in a spotlight, Oliver kneels in prayer, in absolution, and rubs his deal with into the still-burbling drain, sucking the cum-infused bathwater. SLURP! A breath. SLURP! A lick of the metallic drain. SLUUUUUURP!
At the final longest slurp, a woman seated several rows in front of me stood and marched out of my screening of Emerald Fennell’s film Saltburn. Responding to the audience’s groans of horror and delight at the splooge-swilling, she thought she spoke for all of us wh
Jacob Elordi & Barry Keoghan Have The Hottest And Nastiest Off-Screen Relationship In All Of Hollywood
No one is having more fun in Hollywood than Jacob Elordi and Barry Keoghan. The respective Australian and Irish natives—who are both expert contenders vying to be the internet’s collective boyfriend/girlfriend of the month—have recently embarked on the press tour for the deliciously depraved Saltburn.
If you have avoided Letterboxd reviews or any gaudy mid-noughties promotional material, you mightn’t be aware that the emerging foremost men have teamed up for the latest haunting thrilled from the wickedly intelligent mind of Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman).
Saltburn is an erotically obscure tale of class contempt, unrelenting greed, a fascination with beauty and the lengths humanity, (well in this case, middle-class Oxford graduates) will go to climb the social ladder.
Keoghan’s leads the film as awkward interloper Oliver Fast, who draws to the flame of his alluring, handsome and mega-wealthy classmate Felix Catton (Elordi) like a moth. (Moths, spiders, flies and decrepit insects become a prominent motif throughout the film’s runtime).
Without giving too much