Casting can change a script, that's for sure. I keep thinking about Andreas from “A Little” and “Absolutely Local” Love, who was ultimately played by the not so little and certainly not very local Hovik Keuchkerian. I doubt that the novel's Nat would have behaved the same way towards the handsome Armenian-Lebanese giant.
While promoting Saltburn, Jacob Elordi joked with Barry Keoghan about the possibility that Timothée Chalamet was the first candidate for his role. With him, it would have been another film in the “stranger comes to a family and disrupts their lives” category, a subgenre that covers the same line as “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” and whose variations are infinite but a constant have: the stranger is canonically desirable. It would be understandable if the Cattons greeted Chalamet – to paraphrase Sofía Vergara, the heroine of the week – with “open arms and pants down,” but if they did so with a Keoghan who, shall we say, has a complicated relationship to beauty, then that is the grace of a film that, for fans of Euphoria, does not go beyond a return to Brideshead.
Oliver Quick is not distinguished by any talent, he is not a sophisticated seducer, no Ripley or Frank Abagnale, and his deception is vague and easily exposed because the intention of its creator was not to make a satire on social classes, and certainly not It is not intended to ridicule Catton, with whom he shares a common ancestry, but rather to reflect the viewer who, like Quick, approaches his film dazzled by the 127 rooms of Drayton House. The same one who fascinates himself with the million-dollar reality shows and follows the freeze-dried stocks of Preysler or Pombo with the curiosity of an entomologist. What Emerald Fennell wants them to understand is that the only way they can gain access to the lives they don't deserve is to step over their corpses.
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