Reflecting on Saltburn a year later with Sadie Soverall: ‘We shot so much more!’

As Saltburn celebrates its first anniversary, we reflect on the film’s success with Sadie Soverall, the only actor to have romantic scenes with Jacob Elordi and Barry Keoghan

It has been almost exactly a year ago since Saltburn blew a hole in TikTok – and our sartorial perspectives – to become the most talked-about film of 2023. Alongside The White Lotus and The Triangle of Sadness, it came to define a new era of upper-class satire. Suddenly everyone was searching for popped Abercrombie & Fitch polos and Ugg boots as a new nostalgia was heralded for 2006, the year in which writer-director Emerald Fennell set the film. She told Vogue of her decision for choosing that time period: “it’s not back in fashion yet but it’s not so old that it’s vintage.”

If the film’s other pull was the hedonistic entanglements of Felix’s impossibly attractive crew at Oxford, then Sadie Soverall should be the name you remember: her character Annabel was the only one to be romantically involved with Jacob Elordi’s Felix and Barry Keoghan’s Oliver. She was introduced as Felix’s girlfriend but turned up at Oliver’s place later for a dalliance sewn by revenge.

“It was pretty crazy. I deleted TikTok by that point and I stayed off social media,” Soverall tells City AM The Magazine. “It was just very cool to be a small part of this massive thing, very surreal.” 

How was it trying to make out with two heart-throbs while overlooked by 50 production crew? “They both were really different. Barry’s this incredible physical actor, I feel like he works very instinctively, he’s this instinctive genius, and Jacob is but in a different way, a more cerebral way. They’re both very, very talented. The film also looks so amazing, it was about making sure it worked very well visually.”

Soverall, who is 22 and grew up in Wandsworth, south London, says she’s professionally “never felt more comfortable” than when she was filming the intimacy scenes, but is fearful that stories involving nudity are too often gratuitous. “I find sex scenes very interesting because it’s a massive part of life and it’s important but I find in a lot of things it’s used as a shock value, and that is fine and an artistic choice, but with the amount it’s used now it’s not very shocking anymore,” she says. “I just find it’s not furthering the story in any way.” 

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Many of Soverall’s Saltburn scenes were cut; Fennell’s workstyle is to shoot a lot of extra material, but even so, Annabel’s limited screen time became a discussion point with the fans. She is comfortable that those decisions were made “to serve the story.” Nevertheless, she’d be keen to see an extended edit. “There was so much in the house that was shot, I’d love to see if there was anything else there.” And Barry Keoghan has teased a deleting kissing scene between him and Felix.

Annabel is just the start: Soverall has played a range of nuanced female roles in her short career, but it wasn’t always that way. She reflects back to the time when she was starting out when she was asked to play “characters who were there just to further a complex story written for an interesting male character.” She feels “very comfortable” turning down scripts like that, but feels it’s imperative to speak her mind about the importance of creating strong female roles to match the male ones. “I think it should be talked about,” she says. “It’s not just women, it’s younger male actors too. I don’t want them to feel pressured so I think it’s important for me to speak my mind.”

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After attending Parkgate House School and Emanuel School in London she was noticed during a school production of Twelfth Night. “An agent came and on the off chance I got signed, it was very lucky,” she says. Swerving professional training to go start into work, her breakthrough role was in 2021’s Netflix drama Fate: The Winx Saga, a supernatural teen drama in which Soverall played a fairy called Beatrix. The show was a huge fan hit but was controversially cancelled after two seasons. “It was a tumultuous time in the world; what I took away from it was just the really warm hearts of the fans and everyone involved. Not to be cheesy but I think in this industry you have to think things happen for a reason. If something’s ended then something news’s coming – that’s how I have to approach things.”

We’re choosing loose-leaf tea in posh tea house Mariage Frères in Covent Garden, a favourite of Soverall’s. She worked nearby this summer in a Donmar Warehouse production of Ibsen’s The Cherry Orchard which was well received by the critics. As well as marking her debut role in London theatre, the production offered Soverall the chance to get to know her home city better; she’d often take long walks to and from work. “For the first half of the rehearsal process I was like, ‘I should not be here!’” remembers Soverall, who felt “a sickening, giddy excitement” taking on the role, but says she felt “so supported” by the process. “Every night was very different. It was very thrilling.” One night was very different: Soverall noticed one of her idols, Cate Blanchett, in the audience. “It was terrifying but I have a way of using the adrenaline,” she says of performing in front of the five-time Oscar-winning Best Actress.

When it comes to finding inspiration, Soverall was captivated by this year’s Olympics, and found herself inspired to find ways to bring sport into her acting work. Kim Jeji, the viral South Korean female pistol shooter, particularly inspired her. “There’s just such high stakes and extremes,” she says through sips of tea in the upstairs part of the tea house, a perversely quiet enclave in the heart of Covent Garden that she recommended, demonstrating her local’s knowledge. Sport ties in with a broader interest in pressure, in particular, the way humans put themselves through it. Recently in dystopian parent-teen drama The Gathering for Channel 4, Soverall had to learn gymnastics. “It’s believing you can,” she says. “I’m quite uncoordinated but I’ve kept up at it.” There’s also a passion for space; she smiles as she shows me her phone’s lock screen image of galaxies.

She’s got multiple projects in the pipeline she’s unable to talk about, but for now she’s feeling nostalgic about her days spent knocking about Drayton House in Northamptonshire where they filmed Saltburn. She’s hoping for a mini cast reunion with the ‘Alpha Hotties’, the name for the group of girls she was filming with.

She may not have had long on screen, but Soverall made her mark, so much so that her Saltburn role has made other opportunities plentiful, and she’s thrilled. “It felt like such a unique film,” she surmises, “a film that was so much about change.”