Emerald Fennell’s long-awaited follow-up to Promising Young Woman has officially arrived. On Wednesday, Warner Bros. Pictures unveiled the first trailer for Saltburn, the upcoming live-action film directed and written by Fennell. The ensemble cast of Saltburn is led by Barry Keoghan and Jacob Elordi, and also includes Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant, Alison Oliver, Archie Madekwe, Carey Mulligan, Paul Rhys, Lolly Adefope, Ewan Mitchell, and Reece Shearsmith.
“My favorite thing in general is sympathy for the devil,” Fennell said of the film in an interview with Vanity Fair. “The sorts of people that we can’t stand, the sorts of people who are abhorrentโif we can love them, if we can fall in love with these people, if we can understand why this is so alluring, in spite of its palpable cruelty and unfairness and sort of strangeness, if we all want to be there too, I think that’s just such an interesting dynamic.”
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What Is Saltburn About?
In Saltburn, Struggling to find his place at Oxford University, Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) finds himself drawn into the world of the charming and aristocratic Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), who invites him to Saltburn, his eccentric family’s sprawling estate, for a summer never to be forgotten.
“He’s just so compelling. He’s got a kind of sex appeal and a vulnerability and a physical presence and a sort of darkness, or he can at least communicate these things in a way that is very rare,” Fennell said of Keoghan. “[We were] holding hands and jumping off a cliff, because a lot of the time we were looking to make something that is sort of visceral and surprising and dark and sexy, and that takes a lot of commitment.”
What Are Emerald Fennell’s New Movies?
Following Promising Young Woman, Fennell has mainly factored into the film world as an actor, portraying the scene-stealing Midge in the recent hit Barbie movie. She is credited as a writer on the upcoming John Wick spinoff film Ballerina, which is poised to debut in 2024. She has also been attached to a movie adaptation of DC’sย Zatanna, which was believed to be part of a larger cinematic pocket involving the Justice League Dark. The fate of the film has remained unclear amid the recent canon changes in the DC Universe, and James Gunn and Peter Safran stepping in to lead DC Studios.
“There are lots of things about her that felt like they could be really, really interesting,” Fennell explained to Empire Magazine in a 2021 interview. “And it’ll be an opportunity to make something really quite dark. And that appealed to me, to make something big and scary. I love that stuff.”
What do you think of the first trailer for Saltburn? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!
Saltburn is set to be released in select theaters on November 24th, before expanding to a wide release on December 1st.