After Nude Dance in ‘Saltburn’ Scene, Barry Keoghan Says He’s a “Bad Dancer”

Less than 24 hours after the world premiere of Cannes favorite Andrea Arnold‘s new competition entry Bird, the filmmaker joined her cast for the festival press conference inside the Palais on Friday. The wide-ranging session covered Arnold’s creative influences, casting choices and the music playlists she gives to her actors.

It also touched on star Barry Keoghan‘s dance abilities as the actor delivers another on screen dance break, this one following his viral fully nude Saltburn finale to the tune of Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s “Murder on the Dance Floor.” In Arnold’s Bird, Keoghan busts a move to “Cotton Eye Joe” and then delivers a solo performance at the microphone, singing and dancing to serenade his new bride at their wedding reception. (In a surprise twist, his character also name drops Ellis-Bextor’s “Murder on the Dance Floor” while trying to find the right song that will get his pet toad to produce hallucinogenics.)

“I don’t think I can dance though, honestly. I think I’m a bad dancer,” Keoghan said when asked about this new trend in his career. “The beauty of dancing on screen is the effort of trying. Seeing someone try to dance is very attractive and intriguing for me. Music plays a big part in everything I do. Andrea is big into music as well.”

Keoghan, who snagged an Oscar nomination for his work in The Banshees of Inisherin, said he’s very big into Arnold, someone he’s been trying to work with for years until this project came along. Bird stars Barry Keoghan, Franz Rogowski, Nykiya Adams, and Jason Buda in the story of a 12-year-old (Adams) who lives with her brother (Buda) and reckless single dad (Keoghan) in a squat in North Kent. As she approaches puberty, she seeks attention and adventure elsewhere. The drudgery of everyday life is thrown off kilter when she meets the enigmatic free-spirit Bird (Rogowski).

“I’ve been saying this in interviews since 2014, 2015, that I wanted to work with Andrea Arnold. I’ve been saying it over and over again and then the opportunity came on this. I wasn’t given a script, I wasn’t given anything like that. It shows the confidence I have in her and the belief, the love, I’d do anything she makes,” he said. “I’d sign on to anything because I know I’d be fully immersed.”

As for Arnold, the press conference kicked off on a lighter note when she was asked about something she said in her festival masterclass conversation that all of her films begin with an image. What was the image for Bird? “A very long time ago, I had the image of a very tall, thin man with a long penis standing on a roof. In that image, there was mist around him. I didn’t know if he was good or bad, or who he was. Was he an alien? That’s where I started.” [Spoiler alert: Rogowski’s Bird character is seen nude on a roof from afar in several scenes.]

Where she finished was in one of the toughest positions of her career. “It was the hardest film I ever made,” Arnold said earlier this week from the stage on Wednesday while accepting the 2024 Carrosse d’Or, or Golden Coach Award, at the Directors’ Fortnight. “There were many challenges, more than usual, and there seemed to be more restrictions than I’d ever known. Lots of things I’ve put on the page and cared about got lost, so the edit was really hard. It was proving really hard to carve from the rushes something of the film I had intended. I was grieving the losses and I felt pretty vulnerable.”

Arnold also said during the press conference that she shot Bird like all of her films, in chronological order. “I do think the film is sort of like an adventure, and you don’t really know where you’re going,” she said. “On some level, you have to let go and give yourself over to that adventure.”