Barry Keoghan didn’t use prosthetic penis for ‘Saltburn’ naked dance scene

Barry Keoghan just made a big revelation about his nude dance scene at the end of director Emerald Fennell‘s wild 2023 drama Saltburn.

In addition to lightly addressing his relationship with pop star Sabrina Carpenter, the 32-year-old Irish actor confirmed on a recent episode of The Louis Theroux Podcast that the flesh you see on display as his character dances naked through an empty mansion to Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s 2001 single “Murder on the Dancefloor” is, in fact, all his — including the full-frontal shots.

“That wasn’t me, by the way. No, I’m playing. Of course it was me,” Keoghan joked after Theroux brought up “speculation was that your willy had been enhanced” for the scene.

“Nah, who said that? Wow,” Keoghan observed. “It was all me. It was a thing I didn’t really bat an eyelid to. I would bat an eyelid if it didn’t fit the story. I remember me and Emerald having chats. It started off with my clothes, she was like, ‘We just need to make it a bit more ownership. He’s kind of got this mansion, it’s his space. When you have that space, we all do at home, we walk around naked because we’re comfy and this is our environment.’ It’s trying to get that across.”

Keoghan starred in the buzzy project — Fennell’s directorial follow-up to her Oscar-winning film Promising Young Woman — as a young scholarship student who, against the backdrop of 2006 Britain, works his way into the lives of upper-crust society via an intense bond with a fellow Oxford student (Jacob Elordi) and his family (Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant).

The final dance scene (with Keoghan in the nude) boosted the global profile of Ellis-Bextor’s two-decade-old hit, catapulting the song back to its original peak position of No. 2 on the United Kingdom music charts, while it also hit No. 51 on the United States Billboard Hot 100 for the first time thanks to its newfound popularity in the film.

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“I spoke to Barry in the morning, and I just said, ‘I don’t know, Barry. I think that he would…unzip,’” Fennell previously told EW of crafting a different semi-nude Saltburn sequence (set atop a grave) with Keoghan, who was nominated for an Oscar for his role in 2022’s The Banshees of Inisherin. “And Barry just said, ‘Yup.’”

“She plants seeds, Emerald, you know what I mean?” Keoghan added. “She knows that they’re going to grow, these seeds, especially when she plants them with me. But it is a testament to Emerald and having that idea and me meeting it with, to be honest, no questions. I was totally on board for it.”

Banshees of Inisherin star Keoghan isn’t the only current star to open up about using his real body in a nude scene, as Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menéndez Story actor Cooper Koch also recently confirmed he didn’t use a prosthetic penis for a brief nude shower scene in the Netflix crime drama.