Saltburn producer Margot Robbie says bathtub scene ‘didn’t feel that shocking’ in script

Margot Robbie has revealed that the first time she read Saltburn’s infamous bathtub scene it “didn’t feel that shocking”.

The 33-year-old Barbie star was one of the producers of Emerald Fennell’s divisive black comedy. Robbie’s production company LuckyChap Entertainment were also behind Fennell’s last film, 2020’s Promising Young Woman.

The scene in question was recently identified by The Independent’s Ellie Harrison as the moment her mother “cracked” while watching the film: “One of the most talked-about sequences sees Barry Keoghan’s libidinous interloper Oliver Quick slurping dregs of bathwater from a drain, minutes after Jacob Elordi’s handsome aristo Felix Catton has pleasured himself in that very same tub.”

Speaking to Variety, Robbie said about the moment: “It didn’t feel that shocking in the script, because Emerald immerses you into a world so quickly. She’s so masterful at tone and plot; she gets you into it so quickly — you’re just immediately like, ‘I’m in this world.’

“So by the time you get to something like the bathtub scene, she’s primed you for it. She’s got you. You’re, like, picking at a scab; you’re like, ‘I can’t help myself.’ Or like popping a pimple: ‘I know I shouldn’t squeeze but I’m gonna.’”

Robbie added that she felt Fennell’s script was “intentionally disgusting and satisfying” in terms of the journey the film takes viewers on. “I think she wanted you to be equally as disgusted as you are titillated, and equally as shocked as you are by finding that depravity in yourself.

“She gets in your brain and she kind of taps into the most depraved parts of it, so that you’re complicit in the story. That’s the watercooler moment — the thing that people are talking about two weeks afterwards.”

Robbie also explained that she had personally taken a hand in the marketing of the film, suggesting releasing shorter ‘taster’ teasers rather than longer trailers.

“There’s got to be an element of mystery,” she said. “I hate trailers that have the whole movie condensed to two minutes. Everyone’s like, ‘It tested really high.’ Of course it did; you gave someone the whole movie.

“Marketing an Emerald Fennell movie is tricky because she is the queen of plot twists, so all the greatest things, you can’t actually show. Because then it wouldn’t be so exciting when you see it in the movie.”

In a four-star review of Saltburn, The Independent‘s Clarisse Loughrey wrote: “As a class satire, it reaches no conclusions. But it’s filled to the brim with darkly funny, bile-slicked revulsion. For its director, who hails from the same upper classes she targets, it’s an act of self-excavation.”