Barry Keoghan talks about the Saltburn scene that brought him closest to death on Hot Ones

“I’m gonna sound cocky, but they don’t really cut my scenes,” Barry Keoghan smirks in a viral clip from the latest episode of Hot Ones. “They keep ’em in there and they wish that they had more.” Given what a hot commodity Keoghan is in Hollywood these days, this cocky admission isn’t much of a surprise. It’s also not a surprise to see another buzzy young actor struggling through a round of hot wings across the table from the Internet’s favorite celebrity interviewer, Sean Evans.

Noting that Keoghan has talked about the danger of pushing a character to their limits, Evans asks if there had ever been a role where he felt “unsafe.” Keoghan responds: “I mean I shagged a grave in Saltburn, right? Can’t get closer to death or getting mud diseases in your…” he trails off meaningfully. “I should get that checked.”

While the “licking the drain” scene got a lot more attention (and, presumably, would be a bigger risk for disease), the “grave shagging” scene is one of Saltburn’s most defining images. As a continuous shot, it’s also one of the longest. At a Q&A attended by The A.V. Club earlier this year, director Emerald Fennell shared, “[In] terms of cutting away, of course everyone wants you to, you know, of course the producer and the distributor says a lot of, ‘Are you going to cut away? Can you cut away there? No, you will cut away there,’ and I said, ‘No.’ Because when I saw it, it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.”

Fennell observed that the scene “goes from funny to horrible to terrible to sort of weirdly sexy to awful again,” and said Keoghan’s passionate embrace of the grave was inspired by a scene in Wuthering Heights “where Heathcliff tries to dig down into Cathy’s grave, and the sort of implication, subtext there is very much made text, I suppose, in this film.”

In Keoghan’s opinion, “Saltburn really pushed it,” he tells Evans. “Every role pushes it, and I like to be pushed. I don’t want something to be comfy. I want to really artistically go there, and there’s moments on sets and movies where you lose sight of camera and you kind of get this, it’s only for two seconds or so, but it’s like this kind of this nauseous feeling… you’re so present. It’s what we chase, I feel—we, as actors, chase every time we go on set.”