LOS ANGELES – Now streaming on Prime Video, Saltburn follows a student named Oliver (Barry Keoghan) as he struggles to fit in with his posh classmates at Oxford University.

But everything changes when he befriends fellow student Felix (Jacob Elordi), a handsome aristocrat who invites him to spend the summer at his family’s grand estate, Saltburn.

Oliver soon finds himself becoming entangled with the rest of the blue-blooded clan, including Felix’s mother Lady Elspeth (Rosamund Pike) and sister Venetia (Alison Oliver).

Speaking at a Los Angeles screening of the film, a sexually charged and darkly comedic psychodrama that is getting Oscar buzz, English writer-director Emerald Fennell says the story is about “the kind of desire that just gets you by the throat and pins you against the wall”.

A key driver of the plot is Oliver’s crush on the seemingly unattainable Felix, and this was inspired by the isolation Fennell witnessed and felt during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“It makes sense to me now that this is the movie that I wrote during lockdown, because I think it’s a movie about what happens when you can’t touch people or the thing you want to touch,” says the 38-year-old film-maker. She took home the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for the thriller Promising Young Woman (2020), along with nominations for Best Picture and Best Director.

Saltburn’s story is also a satire of the ultra-wealthy and a commentary on class struggle.

At the same time, Felix, who seemingly has the world at his feet, is not just a two-dimensional spoilt rich kid, and in many ways is the nicest person in an often insufferable family.

“He is really vile in the same way that everyone else is,” says Elordi, the 26-year-old Australian actor best known for his feature debut in romantic comedy film The Kissing Booth and its two sequels (2018 to 2021), as well as the dark Emmy-winning teen drama Euphoria (2019 to present).

“But I had this idea that he’s like a bolt of sunshine. He has to be up, and it has to be gold, so I was trying to personify that, which is a lot more fun than playing someone s****y.”

And nobody is perfectly good all the time, the actor points out. “If you’re watching yourself 24 hours a day, everyone does something a little wrong.”

Even though Oliver is socially the underdog, he is a deeply flawed character as well.

Keoghan says portraying the multi-faceted protagonist is a proper showcase for an actor, and that he could not put the screenplay down when he first read it.

For the performance, he “wanted to create an arc so I kind of have five different Olivers to play”.

“And for each one of them, to have a different acceleration and tone and physicality, and to look different,” says the 31-year-old Irish actor, who received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for the dark comedy The Banshees Of Inisherin (2022).

Elordi says he looks up to and learnt a lot from Keoghan, who has been acting since 2011 and received good notices after breakout roles in the war epic Dunkirk (2017) and horror thriller The Killing Of A Sacred Deer (2017).

“Barry is like the actor’s actor. He’s been making movies since well before I made movies, and his movies are the movies that you watch when you’re, like, ‘I’m going to be an actor’.”

Sharing scenes with Keoghan “felt like plugging into the source of what it is”, Elordi adds. “He’s like a mainline of electricity.”

Despite the dark and troubling themes of the film, the mood on set was light. And when it came time to shoot the big and often debauched party scenes, some of the fun continued off-camera.

“Most of my job was trying to stop people from having a party,” jokes Fennell.

Saltburn was shot at the magnificent Drayton House, a country estate in the middle of England, and the cast had a blast there, says Archie Madekwe, who plays Felix’s cousin Farleigh.

“It was a gorgeous summer, it was boiling hot and we were in the countryside and went swimming in these lakes every day,” says the 23-year-old English actor, who recently headlined the race-car drama Gran Turismo (2023).

Adds Elordi: “Everyone was just getting up to mischief and running around on this sprawling acreage with a castle.”

• Saltburn is available on Prime Video.