Now That’s Method: How Rosamund Pike Researched the Idle Rich for Her Role in ‘Saltburn’

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | December 28, 2023 |

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | December 28, 2023 |

“Was there anything you did to prepare to play Elspeth?” The Hollywood Reporter asked Rosamund Pike, who played Elspeth Catton in Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn.

“Yeah, loads. I went on vacation, I tried some new cocktails. I ordered some Vogues from 2007 off eBay and basically tried to do as little as possible apart from thinking what I was going to wear and how I’m going to do my hair,” she answered. She went method on the idle rich.

“I’ve done so much research for so many characters, including having chemistry lessons when I was playing Marie Curie [in 2019’s Radioactive] that, really, I was like, ‘What? Oh, there’s really nothing to do. All I’ve got to do is less.”

Someone should put that on a decorative pillow.

But sometimes doing less was difficult. She described living in the estate where the movie was shot:

“They’ve got beautiful gardens that I could get lost in and go and read. I mean, I wouldn’t tell Elspeth I was reading a book—I don’t think Elspeth has ever read a book in her life. I think there are not enough pictures. I think she likes magazines. But me, Rosamund, would definitely go into the gardens and lie in the grass and read books.”

But in the end, she and Fennell were both very clear on the character of Elspeth:

“With Elspeth, I just always thought, ‘How can I drape myself best over all the furniture?’ I think she’s someone who’s never going to sit if she can lie and never going to stand if she can sit. She’s just going to be as relaxed as possible in all situations.”

As for the comedic relief that Elspeth often provided in the script, she said,

“What I don’t know is: Is she funny because the fact of her is just ridiculous, or are her observations just so outrageous and so indiscreet that we just laugh because we kind of wish we could say things like that? Maybe we all wish we could be as indiscreet as Elspeth. I probably do at times. I did find it very, very freeing. She’s got no filter. And I did want to make people laugh. I did want the rest of the cast to enjoy Elspeth as well.”

And, honestly, I did. This was a movie where we were supposed to love and hate every character, but Elspeth, to me, was the most compelling. If I have any complaints about the film, it’s that it didn’t entirely investigate Elspeth’s potential psychology.

Pike spoke about that potential by saying:

“I think she dips a toe in reality every so often and sort of shudders and takes it out pretty quickly…Emerald always said that when we follow Elspeth back through the maze toward the center, she knows it’s going to greet her with this sort of unimagined worst horror. And it had to be Elspeth who would find Felix. Emerald said we will never see her face because a mother’s grief should not and cannot be seen…But then, by the time everybody else arrives, Elspeth’s already shut up, completely siphoned off the real, true feeling because I think she’s just so adept. At the minute she feels something real, she slices through it. She just cuts it.”

That’s what I find compelling about Elspeth: the feeling is there—she has access to it—but she stops it. Even the most idle of the idle rich have feelings.