Inside mysterious Saltburn house and strict rules for keeping real name secret

Despite the owners’ best efforts to keep it secret, the identity of the Saltburn house – where Barry Keoghan’s character engaged in some semen slurping and danced around stark naked – has been revealed.

The raunchiest film of 2023 was filmed at Drayton House in Northamptonshire. Though it’s never been open to the public, keen fans have discovered how to get there and see the mansion in all its splendour. It’s on a private road, however, so you can’t drive right up to the mansion itself.

The home – which has an epic 127 rooms – is privately owned by the Stopford Sackville family, and the owners granted filming permission only if nobody involved in the film revealed the name of the property. But the team said they were given “free rein” to decorate the home as they wished.

READ MORE: Carmen Electra, 51, strips totally naked with only pizza slice to conceal modesty

READ MORE: Want more showbiz? Daily Star has just the thing for you!

The house itself is thought to have been constructed around 1328, originally owned by the Draytons before passing down through various families and ending up with the Sackvilles in the 1700s. Its Baroque façade was added in the 18th century, and the house soon earned a Grade I listed status.

Director Emerald Fennell told House and Garden that most of the action was filmed on-site for a specific reason. She said: “That’s why the house was so important. It needed to be something that hadn’t been used before. This hadn’t been photographed even, let alone put on film. We always wanted the exact sense that it is a real place.”

She added: “When I first went into the house the busts in the great hall had silly hats on them and I was like, ‘That’s exactly it. That is exactly what it needs to feel like.’ To the people who live here it’s just home and it’s just funny. These grand things are just the clutter of your everyday life. That was something I felt we hadn’t really seen before.”

The crew made a few changes to the iconic location – and specifically for the bathtub scene. In it, Keoghan’s character Oliver Quick watches Jacob Elordi’s Felix Catton pleasuring himself in the bath, before quickly approaching the tub to lick up his bathwater and other bodily fluids.

But at 6ft 5in, Elordi was too tall for a traditional tub, and a new one had to be constructed specially for him. The shared bathroom was also added into the home, with new artwork also added around the home.

The bathroom scene was filmed in a converted bedroom, but weight limits on the floor meant a cast iron bath would be too heavy and drop through the floor. Instead, fibreglass reproduction tubs were made for the scene.

And Barry thankfully wasn’t slurping real bathwater. Production designer Suzie Davies told Yahoo! it was “yoghurt and a bit of milk and some water”. She explained: “He did it four times and really went for it. Every one he did was a different kind of slurp.

“Often, when you film things like that, there are 20 people in the room. It’s quite tense. But the cast can bring something that’s so extraordinary that you can hear a pin drop. So when Barry was doing his stuff, it was amazing. He had no inhibitions.”

The real house doesn’t have a hedge maze outside, so a mixture of constructed sets and CGI was used for those scenes. But the chapel, pond and gardens were all real.

The decision to shoot the movie in a square aspect ratio was a lot to do with the house itself. 1.33:1 was chosen for the movie – a strange choice in the days of cinema viewing. But Fennell told American Cinematographer “In a house like that, the ceilings are frescoed, the floor has marquetry detail, every light switch is ornate … there would be so much we’d be missing if we used an aspect ratio that cut those off.”

Over on TikTok, fans of the movie have been showing you exactly how to visit the house without trespassing. User be_better_known told fans: “You need to start at a place called Lowick, and find the Snooty Fox pub, where you can park.

For more of the latest showbiz news from Daily Star, make sure you sign up to one of our newsletters here.

“Then you need to find Drayton Road, go down this for a little while past the cottages, they have some nice little horses on the left. Then over the river; there’s a water feature on the left, up this lane, and then you enter the estate.”

She explained that a public footpath runs right up past the side of the house, with gates barring entry to the driveway – but providing an epic view of the Saltburn manse.

Follow Daily Star on Threads here.

Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk