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Jacob Elordi still finds the viral attention placed on the racy bathtub sequence in his movie Saltburn surprising.
Elordi, 28, discussed the response to his 2023 thriller during his Thursday, Nov. 6 appearance on Entertainment Weekly’s Awardist podcast while promoting his new movie Frankenstein. “I actually think it shows me just how, I guess, prudish we are,” he told the outlet with a laugh. “Because when I watch that, I just think there are far more extreme things in cinema that I’ve seen, far more graphic. There’s more alarming things in the top 10 streamed remakes of crime documentaries on every streaming platform.”
Elordi costarred with Barry Keoghan in writer-director Emerald Fennell’s 2023 movie. The lanky Australian actor portrayed Felix, a wealthy student at the U.K.’s University of Oxford in the mid-2000s. Keoghan, now 33, played Oliver, a student who befriends Felix and slowly becomes obsessed with him and his family while spending the summer at their home in rural England.
The bathtub sequence, which occurs early in the movie, shows Keoghan’s Oliver drinking bathwater from Felix’s tub after he secretly watches Felix masturbate during a bath.
“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,” Elordi added. “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.”
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Moments like the bathtub scene in Saltburn and Keoghan’s full-frontal nudity in the film’s final moments made the movie one of 2023’s cult hits. Sellers on marketplaces like Amazon and Etsy even created bathwater-scented candles inspired by the movie, which Elordi sampled during a January 2024 appearance on The Tonight Show.
Filmmaker Fennell, 40, told PEOPLE that she believes Saltburn’s bathtub sequence “is the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen in my life” in a November 2023 interview following the movie’s release.
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“And I’m saying that anyone else is safe to feel that,” she said at the time. “I’m interested in how it makes you feel. Did you feel something you’ve never felt before in a movie? And if that’s the case, then the movie is effective, and it’s worked, and that’s what we wanted to do.”
While the filmmaker admitted that not all fans would “love” the sequence back in 2023, she felt that people who do connect with the movie would experience “a profound feeling of being seen — that all of us felt making it, actually.”
Elordi’s new movie Frankenstein is streaming on Netflix now. Saltburn is streaming on Prime Video.
