At one point in the new film Saltburn, Rosamund Pike’s aristocratic matriarch, Elspeth Catton, learns of a friend’s death by suicide. Without even a beat to process the news, she says to her family, but also to no one in particular: “She’d do anything for attention.”
It’s a perfect encapsulation of Elspeth, a mother who performs extreme empathy but whose avoidance of actual feeling and compassion has curdled into a poison that she absentmindedly shoots off like darts.
In writer-director Emerald Fennell’s psychosexual thriller, Elspeth embodies the allure of the upper class: an impossibly rich woman made all the more gorgeous by her wealth, who swans around her Versailles-like estate in glamorous dresses with no care other than what to plan for dinner. She also telegraphs that lifestyle’s trap, an imprisonment of luxury that warps her sense of humanity and ability to connect. She’s a rose entirely ignorant of her thorns.
Elspeth is introduced in the film when her son, Felix (Jacob Elordi), brings his woebegotten friend, Oliver (Barry Keoghan), home to the family’s Saltburn mansion for the summer. Oliver’s obsession with Felix evolved into a friendship when Felix began feeling protective of Oliver, following his parents’ drug addictions and his father’s death. Oliver’s tragedy thrills Elspeth, who sees her summer visitor as a pet to spoil and pity for a few months—after all, that’s far easier than taking vested interest in the lives of her actual children.
Elspeth is an emblem of contradictions. She purports to be an empath, but is brutally cold to her family. She seems to be invigorated by her lavish life, but is terribly alone. Her penchant for gossip suggests a keen ability for observation, yet she’s blind to the reality of what’s going on around her—or, at least, chooses not to see.
“Emerald unpicked every sort of myth of the English country house and family and turned it on its head,” Pike told The Daily Beast’s Obsessed in a recent interview. “She showed you that, actually, these people are not living in most of the 180 rooms of their house. They’re actually just huddling around one kind of old crappy TV watching The Ring eating Haribo.”
With Saltburn now in wide release—and igniting an inferno of discourse online—we talked to Pike about Elspeth’s peculiar sensibilities, the fun of playing a character like this, and what it’s like to star in a film that’s eliciting so much shock from audiences. (Read a tutorial on those scenes—cum-filled bathwater; sex with a gravesite!—here.)
It’s so interesting how we meet Elspeth. Oliver is walking through this massive estate, which starts to give the audience such grand expectations. And then when we finally meet her, she and the whole family are crowded on a small couch together watching a tiny TV.
Because of how Emerald chose to shoot that scene, you kind of miss the edges. You’re like, “Wait, you’re not going to show us the whole room?”
What do you think that introduction tells us about who Elspeth is?
Well, Elspeth is somebody who does very, very little. She’d be exhausted from just the thought of planning things to cook and what dinner was going to be. Oh, she’d need to put her feet up after that! I can give you the whole Elspeth backstory. I don’t know if you want to know.
Of course I want to know!
I imagined she was sort of young and a party girl in New York, with Farleigh’s mother, Frederica. She was probably quite wild and slightly going off the rails. And then Frederica said, “Look, why don’t I introduce you to my brother? He’s very sensible. He will take you out for some nice meals. Even if you’re not interested in him, you’ll go to some fabulous restaurants.” So Elspeth does, and that’s when she meets Sir James and finds him quite sort of comfortable. He takes her home one summer from New York and she thinks, “All right, this could be quite comfortable.”
What was it about her that excited you, that you thought you could pull off?
For the last few years I’ve been working on this show for Amazon called The Wheel of Time, which is fantasy. My character is a woman with a cause. She’s an amazing character, but she’s very earnest. She’s dutiful and she has honor and she’ll put everything aside in the way of personal gratification for the sake of her cause. And Elspeth is the exact opposite. She will not sacrifice personal pleasure for anything or anyone. She’s very funny, which Moiraine is not. It was the polar opposite.
I’d say so.
I just thought, “I really want to go and lounge around on some sofas and do absolutely nothing and drop some funny lines.” That, basically, was very appealing. And laugh and create this sort of mad environment that we think people will be appalled by, and yet know that if they were invited for a summer they’d absolutely come.
That’s what makes watching the movie such an interesting experience. You’re appalled by so much of the behavior, but you also begin to root for it. And then you feel a bit of shame for wanting to see all the depravity.
So you want people to die?
Watching this, sort of!
You’re awful! Tell me about yourself. Oh God, darling, why do you feel like that? Have you experienced a lot of loss in your life?
Ha! How long do you have?
(Laughs) That’s what she’d do. She’d get her tentacles into you, you know? She was delicious in that way. It hooks you in. Amazon has been putting up sort of quotes that people have said, like, “I’d love to be insulted by Rosamund Pike.” You think, everyone has their kink!
“Kink” is a funny word with this movie. I didn’t know that I had a kink to, you know, see someone lick bathwater that has someone’s cum in it. But here we are.
Right! Then you find a bit of a turn-on, and you think, “Oh, what does that say about me?” Emerald is sort of a witch doctor-cum-therapist, with a bit of disapproving nun thrown in there. “I put it out there. I’m not saying I like it, but you seem to…”
Elspeth has this very funny, transfixing cadence of speaking. Where did that line delivery come from?
The lines themselves were funny. So the idea was not to interfere with them too much, really. And Elspeth doesn’t think she’s being funny. Growing up in England, you’ve heard so many versions of the English upper classes. It’s this idea that people smother you with small talk, because woe betide that you talk about anything serious, because that’s a social death. So she’s just got to keep the chatter up, just keep it flowing along. And already her brain is on to the next thing, because God forbid you ask her something that actually needs a serious answer.
That makes sense.
Does that answer your question? Not really, does it? It’s just even more perplexing and it doesn’t answer the question. It’s how she appeared in my head. I’m trying to give you a clever answer. And the truth is, I read Emerald’s script and that’s how she sounded in my ear when I read it. And that’s how she is.
You don’t have to be clever! That was a good answer.
Elspeth is not very clever, but I’m trying to show that I am a bit cleverer than Elspeth. So I’m trying to impress you and actually, that’s just how Elspeth is, and I think I just let her be.
Watching the film is a visceral experience, as so many people have said after they left a screening. What was your reaction to that element of the film when you were shooting?
We shot almost all in sequence. We had so much fun at the beginning. We were gearing up for the party. Obviously that’s a big turning point in the film, but on the night that we were preparing for the party, it was as if the entire cast and crew were going to one of the greatest parties of all time. It was three all-nighters in a row, which was work. But the atmosphere, the music, and the vibe was like a party. So when the film changes, it was a terrible shock to all of us. Obviously, we know what’s coming. Obviously, we read the script. We’ve worked on it. We’ve talked about it. But still, the turning point and the awfulness of it, because we’ve been having this kind of enchanted summer up until that point, it hit us even harder. In the way that the best films do.
I can totally imagine that.
We just trusted Emerald that she could keep everything alive. She could keep you laughing even in the moments of deepest horror. I haven’t yet been able to see the film with an audience, but I understand that people are just laughing and laughing and laughing, and then there is a sort of deathly silence, which sounds exactly as it should be, to me.
When I talked to Emerald, we discussed how usually a film would cut away during the scenes with the bathwater, or the humping on the grave, for example. But she doesn’t cut away. The sequences keep going on, as the audience gets even more uncomfortable. What is it like to act in a film where that’s the approach?
I wasn’t in any of those scenes, but when I saw them, I had the same reaction as an audience does, which is, “OK. Oh, wow. OK, she’s going on longer than I thought. OK, so they’re going to… Oh, right. Oh, they’re not OK. They’re not going to cut. Oh, wow. OK, we’re really not over yet. Whoa, OK. We’re going there.” I had exactly the same reaction.
What do you think it is about Oliver that intrigues Elspeth?
She loves damage. She loves a damaged person. It turns attention away from her own damage. And it’s certainly a lot easier to engage with other people and deal with strangers than her own children. She would like to be seen as a compassionate, caring person, but it’s just too much to have to be caring about or listen to the problems of your own children. So somebody who comes in for a summer is perfect, because also they will adore her. They will think about how kind and how benevolent she is. She wants to be a sort of benevolent goddess, who reigns on high and deigns to let people grovel at her feet, and she will bestow kindness. That’s who Elspeth is. That’s what she wants. She wants to be adored.
What effect do you think she had on Oliver?
Not much. I don’t think she changed Oliver. I think Elspeth is actually quite an ineffectual person. I think the only real effect she has is probably on her children, in that a permanent state of therapy would have been needed for life with her as their mother. I think Elspeth is someone who is sort of emotionally anorexic. She’s not able to go there. That’s why she shuts down so quickly when anything upsetting happens. To go there is far too terrifying.
If she dipped a toe into the water of genuine feeling, I think she feels she’ll be sucked down the plug hole of despair and never come up. So she’ll just rise into the area of chitter chatter. That’s why they called them the chattering classes, the upper classes in England, because you just keep chatting and then you don’t have to feel anything. You just keep on chatting away. Don’t be serious about anything. Just keep on. Chitchat, chitchat, chitchat. Being amusing is so much more important than anything else.
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